Portuguese Architecture

by Walter Crum Watson

Now under the west window of the north aisle there is a small tablet with the following inscription in Portuguese[154]:—'This chapel was erected in A.D. 1572, but profaned in 1810 was restored in 1848 by L. L. d'Abreu,' etc.

Of course in 1572 João de Castilho had been long dead, but the inscription was put up in 1848, and it is quite likely that by then L. L. d'Abreu and his friends had forgotten or did not know that even as late as the sixteenth century dates were sometimes still reckoned by the era of Cæsar, so finding it recorded that the chapel had been built in the year 1572 they took for granted that it was A.D. 1572, whereas it may just as well have been E.C. 1572, that is A.D. 1534, just the very time when João de Castilho was building the dormitory in the convent and using there the same curious panelling. Besides in 1572 this form of renaissance had long been given up and been replaced by a heavier and more classic style brought from Italy. It seems therefore not unreasonable to claim this as João de Castilho's work, and to see in it one of the earliest as well as the most complete example of this form of renaissance architecture, a form which prevailed side by side with the work of the Frenchmen and their pupils for about fifteen years.

Now in some respects this chapel recalls some of the earlier renaissance buildings in Italy, and yet no part of it is quite Italian, nor can it be called Spanish. The barrel vault here and in the dormitory chapel in the convent are Italian features, but they have not been treated exactly as was done there, or as was to be done in Portugal some fifty years later, so that it seems more likely that João de Castilho got his knowledge of Italian work at second-hand, perhaps from one of the men sent there by Dom Manoel, and not by having been there himself.

No other building in this style can be surely ascribed to him, and no other is quite so pleasing, yet there are several in which refined classic detail of a similar nature is used, and one of the best of these is the small church of the Milagre at Santarem. As for the cloisters which are mentioned later, they have much in common with João de Castilho's work at Thomar, as, for instance, in the Claustros da Micha, or the Claustro da Hospedaria; in the latter especially the upper story suggests the arrangement which became so common.

This placing of a second story with horizontal architrave on the top of an arched cloister is very common in Spain, and might have been suggested by such as are found at Lupiana or at Alcalá de Henares,[155] but these are not divided into bays by buttresses, so it is more likely that they were borrowed from such a cloister as that of Sta. Cruz at Coimbra, where the buttresses run up to the roof of the upper story and where the arches of that story are almost flat.

Santarem, Milagre.

The Milagre or Miracle church at Santarem is so called because it stands near where the body of St. Irene, martyred by the Romans at Nabantia, now Thomar, after floating down the Nabão, the Zezere, and the Tagus, came to shore and so gave her name to Santarem.

The church is small, being about sixty-five feet long by forty wide. It has three aisles, wooden panelled roofs, an arcade resting on Doric columns, and at the east a sort of transept followed by an apse. The piers to the west side of this transept are made up of four pilasters, all of different heights. The highest, the one on the west side, has a Corinthian capital and is enriched in front by a statue under a canopy standing on a corbel upheld by a slender baluster shaft. The second in height is plain, and supports the arch which crosses the central aisle. The arches opening from the aisles into the transept chapel are lower still, and rest, not on capitals, but on corbels. Like the nave arch, on their spandrels heads are carved looking out of circles. Lowest of all—owing to the barrel vault which covers the central aisle at the crossing—are the arches leading north and south to the chapels. They too spring from corbels and are quite plain.

Santarem, Marvilla.

Up in the town on the top of the hill the nave of the church of the Marvilla—whose Manoelino door and chancel have already been mentioned—is of about the same date. This nave is about one hundred feet long by fifty-five wide, has three aisles with wooden ceilings; the arcades of round arches with simple moulded architrave rest on the beautiful Ionic capitals of columns over twenty-six feet high. These capitals, of Corinthian rather than of Ionic proportions, with simple fluting instead of acanthus leaves, have curious double volutes at each angle, and small winged heads in the middle of each side of the abacus.