A few yards distant, through a little maze of mediæval streets, is the cathedral, the Sé, with a quiet little courtyard before it, from the parapet of which the red roofs and abundant verdure of the city spread downward in waves to the water-side. These north Portuguese cathedrals are marvellously alike; sharing the early beauties and later barbarities of their successive generations of masters. This of Oporto is a good specimen. The sturdy warrior kings who wrested Portugal, bit by bit, from Castilian and from Moor, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were true crusaders. Where they set their foot sprang up the Christian church, to testify for ever their gratitude for victory vouchsafed to the Cross that symbolised their faith. Solid and staidly devotional were the edifices they raised; and wherever their work remains unconcealed by the scrolly banalities of a later age, it bears still the impress of simple faith and unostentatious grandeur. Here on the hill crest at Oporto stand two massive low towers, one still crowned by the pointed Morisco machicolations of the twelfth century, whilst its fellow, partly rebuilt, is spoilt by the addition of a trivial eighteenth-century parapet, with urns as an adornment. Still, the massive solidity of the towers remains, which is something to be thankful for when we regard the hideous top-heavy early eighteenth-century façade that connects them. The south door, of majestic romanesque, is similarly marred. Around it has been built a barbarous porch, overloaded with meaningless ornament, which not only obscures the serious work of the early builder, but half covers and cuts in two a lovely old round window above the door which lights the transept inside. But, however much these curly horrors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may distract the eye, they do not destroy what is still visible of the old edifice. The double flight of low steps, for instance, which leads to this south door has for handrails two ancient stone serpents, so simple in design, yet so effective and perfectly adapted for their purpose, as to prove the unaffected but consummate artistry of the designer, whose taste must have been formed whilst yet the Byzantine traditions were strong in the stern romanesque.
One is struck at once in entering any of these cathedrals, and more particularly that of Oporto and its close congener Braga, with the vast difference between them and the pompous, splendid Spanish cathedrals. In the latter the span of the nave is usually tremendous, the church is plunged in tinted gloom, and the whole of the centre of the nave is blocked by an immense choir. Here in North Portugal the note struck in the cathedrals is not mystery richly dight, as in Spain, but sincere austerity, and a simple faith so essential in the edifice that the grave granite columns and arches appear as unaffected by the heaps, and piles, and masses of curly carved gilt wood around them as a monolith might be by the lizards that bask and slither round its base. Here in Oporto, for instance, the low, massive, granite pillars that line the narrow nave, and support the round romanesque arches, seem sullenly to bid defiance to time and decay; such is their prodigious solidity. And yet even these a later age has surmounted, if not adorned, with curly Corinthian capitals of carved gilt wood! Every altar here, and indeed nearly all over Portugal, is an overloaded mass of this particular barbaric style of decoration dear to the Portuguese since the seventeenth century. The skill in its production is undeniably great, especially in the chapel of St. Vincent in Oporto Cathedral; and in moderation the employment of richly painted, carved, and gilded wood generally may be advantageous where the light is low and the architectural style ornate. But here, where the simple romanesque prevails and the churches are flooded with light, it overwhelms one. In this low, old, plain Sé, either gilded wood or high-relief designs in beaten gold or silver in endless intricacy strike the eye unmercifully at every turn. On one of these ornate altars, screened by a curtain which a fee will raise, stands the ancient effigy, which those who still hold the simple faith of their fathers venerate so devoutly—Our Lady of Alem. Ages ago, so the story runs, when this old fane was yet a-building in the twelfth century, some Douro fishermen found their nets heavy with an unusual burden, and raising them, found this image, a miraculous gift vouchsafed them from the sea. Since then the prayers of those who win their living on the deep have been ceaselessly offered to the Lady of Alem for safety and good luck, and simple offerings of gratitude for boons thus gained—for sickness healed or safe return—hang thickly round the shrine.
The beautiful little cloisters of the cathedral are of a later date than the church—grave and simple Gothic of the late fourteenth century, with three small pointed lancet arches in each span, and a plain round light in the tympanum above. But even here the eighteenth century has done some damage by building out highly ornamental buttresses between the main spans. All around on the inner wall of the cloister is a decoration which abounds in nearly every Portuguese church that has lived through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—namely, large pictorial representations in blue and white tiles, like those commonly connected with the town of Delft. In the churches these tile pictures usually represent scenes from Scripture history, with a large admixture of heathen mythology or ordinary emblematic fancies, as here in Oporto, and the effect is quaint and not unpleasing. One of the things indeed which most strongly strike a stranger in Portugal, in the north especially, is the almost universal employment of glazed tiles, azulejos, both inside and outside buildings of all kinds, the majority of the better sort of dwelling-houses being entirely covered outside by tile designs in colours, sometimes very elaborate and beautiful. The custom exists to some extent in Spain, but is not so common there as in Portugal. In each case, however, the taste and original manufacture, like the name of these tiles, are clearly Moorish, and in some of the older edifices, to be mentioned later, the tiles themselves date from a period when Moors or Mudejares produced them.
In the sacristy of Oporto Cathedral they will show you a painting on terra-cotta of the Virgin and Child, backed by St. Joseph and angels bearing a cross, which is asserted to be a Raphael. The composition and drawing are clearly the work of a disciple of his school, but the colouring is dull and grey, such as the great one of Urbino would never have produced. Not this so-called Raphael, but another picture of the highest interest and beauty, is the principal artistic treasure of the city. In the board-room of Oporto’s most cherished and beneficent institution, the vast charitable organisation called the Misericordia, there hangs a painting that has few, if any, equals in Portugal. It is claimed for Jan Van Eyck, who is known to have been in Portugal for two years at about the period (1520) represented by the work, though personally I could see but slight traces of the peculiar quality of either of the brothers Van Eyck. Certainly it is broader in style than anything I have seen from the brush of the younger brother Jan, and may well be the work of Hubert Van der Goes or Hans Memling. But, whoever may be the painter, the picture is a magnificent one. Against a background representing a typical Flemish landscape and walled town, such as Memling loved to paint, there is a highly ornamented font filled with a pool of blood replenished from the stream that issues from the Saviour’s side, as He hangs upon the cross rising from the centre of the pool. Upon the edge of the font, on each side of the cross, in attitudes of prayer, stand two lovely life-size figures of the Virgin and St. John, whilst in the foreground there kneel, in regal robes of crimson, ermine, and gold brocade, the figures of the founder of the Misericordia in 1499, King Manuel the Fortunate and his wife. Kneeling behind them in decreasing size are members of their family, and on the farther side beyond the font are groups of ecclesiastics and laymen, all evidently life-like portraits of prominent courtiers, or benefactors of the institution. The colouring of the picture is glowing and gorgeous in the extreme, and the loving care expended upon the details is such as only the early Flemings had patience to exercise, accompanied by a breadth and boldness unusual in most of them. Fons Vitæ, as the painting is called, from an inscription on the edge of the font, is emblematical of the foundation of the home of mercy it adorns. Nor is it the only art treasure the Misericordia possesses, apart from the hundreds of awful daubs representing dead and gone benefactors that crowd every inch of wall-space. There is to be seen a beautiful Gothic gold chalice of fifteenth-century Portuguese work, some fifteen inches high, a specimen of the famous handicraft of the city, of great interest, the work being of the most intricate and elaborate description, and the condition of the jewel perfect.
Away from the river-side and the immediate surroundings of the cathedral, Oporto has little to show in the form of architectural quaintness. A busy, bustling place of modern-looking houses for the most part, the streets dominated by the indispensable electric tramways, casting scorn upon the lumbering ox wains that alone compete with them. Yet the city has some striking points that should not be missed. The view is very fine, for instance, from the top of the main modern shopping thoroughfare, the Rua de S. Antonio, which swoops down suddenly like a giant switchback to the Praça de Dom Pedro, the centre of the city, and then as the Rua dos Clerigos soars aloft again as suddenly to another eminence crowned by the extraordinary tower of the Church of the Clerigos, one of the loftiest spires in Portugal. The effect, looking up on either side from the Praça de Dom Pedro, is as curious as any streetscape of its kind in Europe. The Praça de Dom Pedro itself, crowded almost day and night with people, busy and idle, is a typical Portuguese “place,” paved, as most of them are, by the strange wave pattern in black and white stone mosaic that gives to the Praça de Dom Pedro in Lisbon (the Rocio) the English name of “rolling motion square.”
From the Praça de Dom Pedro in Oporto, leading downward towards the river-side, is the famous street of the old city called Rua das Flores, where now, as for centuries past, the gold and silver filigree jewelry for which Oporto is famous is made and sold in a score of dark old-fashioned little shops; and still farther down is the Praça do Comercio, with a striking statue amidst the flower-beds of Portugal’s national hero, Prince Henry the Navigator. In this square stands, too, the principal architectural boast of modern Oporto, the Exchange, of which the interior is really grandiose in the florid style so beloved by the Portuguese. The elaborate high-relief carvings prevalent in Portugal are usually executed in soft marble-like limestone, which hardens with exposure to the air; but here in the Bolsa of Oporto the intricate festoons and ingenious caprices that stand out everywhere in relief on walls, pillars, and staircases are carved out of the solid grey granite of which the edifice is built, as if out of defiance the most difficult material had been sought. Some of the fine apartments, especially the Tribunal of commerce, are beautifully decorated in frescoes by Salgado, in style much resembling those of Lord Leighton; and the great ballroom is a gorgeous hall in the brilliant gold and coloured arabesques of the Alhambra.
The Exchange is built upon the site of a disestablished Franciscan monastery, and cowering under the shadow of its modern magnificence there still stands the convent Church of St. Francis. The seventeenth century has left little of the original fifteenth-century church standing, and the interior is a mass of extravagantly rococo carved and gilt wood and other monstrosities; but in an ancient south transept chapel there is an altar-piece of interest in the style of Mantegna, though the sacristan ascribes it to some impossible artist of another school and century. Nothing, indeed, can equal the ignorance of, and apparent indifference to, antique and artistic objects in Portugal by the persons in charge of them. Even in national museums and historic buildings belonging to the Government, the guardians appear to have been chosen without the slightest regard to their fitness for understanding or describing the objects in their care, and the demeanour of the Portuguese people generally towards such objects is such as to force the conviction that, however proud they may be that their country has produced gems of art admired by strangers, they themselves have but a vague appreciation of their beauties or their merit.
The precipitous street leading up from the Praça de Dom Pedro to the conspicuous Church of the Clerigos is gay with a line of the drapers’ shops, with the gaudy wares aflaunt, which appeal specially to the country folk who flock in with their produce to the picturesque market of the Anjo behind the church. Red and yellow, blue and green, strive for mastery from street kerb to parapet, for the stock is as much outside the shops as in; and under the blazing sun, with the eternally deep azure sky overhead, the feast of colour in the clear air is so lavish as to dazzle eyes accustomed to the low tones and soft outlines of England. But relief is near. Through the chaffering market, with its piles of luscious fruit and all the bounteous gifts of earth and sea spread temptingly before brightly clad country wenches with flashing black eyes, the wayfarer may pass but need not tarry; nor is it worth his while to penetrate into the over-florid eighteenth-century churches of the Clerigos and the Carmo, which lie in his way—for just beyond them is a beautiful sub-tropical garden where shady groves of palms invite to repose, and towering planes temper the glare with a soft haze of sea-green. Seated in a quiet nook, with leisure now to watch the passers-by closely, one is struck by the prosperous busy look of the working people. There is no undue noise, and a stranger is allowed to go his way without unwelcome attention; above all, marvellous to relate, beggars are rare, whilst the persistent, offensive, mendicancy, amounting often to sheer blackmail, which is a perfect plague in Spain, is here quite unknown.
A SHOP IN OLD OPORTO.