Portuguese Architecture

by Walter Crum Watson

The east end is naturally the oldest part and most closely resembled its French original; the eight round columns of the apse have good plain capitals like those found in so many early Cistercian churches, even in Italy;[52] the round-headed clerestory windows are high and narrow, and there are well-developed flying buttresses. Unfortunately all else has been changed: in the apse itself everything up to the clerestory level has been hidden by two rows of classic columns and a huge reredos, and all the choir chapels have been filled with rococo woodwork and gilding, the work of an Englishman, William Elsden, who was employed to beautify the church in 1770.[53] Why except for the choir aisle, and the chapels in choir and transept, the whole church should be of the same height, it is difficult to say, for such a method of building was unknown in France and equally unknown in Spain or Portugal. Possibly by the time the nave was reached the Frenchmen who had planned the church were dead, and the native workmen, being quite unused to such a method of construction, for all the older vaulted churches have their central barrel upheld by the half-barrel vault of the galleries, could think of no other way of supporting the groining of the main aisle. They had of course the flying buttresses of the choir apse to guide them, but there the points of support come so much closer together, and the weight to be upheld is consequently so much less than could be the case in the nave, that they may well have thought that to copy them was too dangerous an experiment as well as being too foreign to their traditional manner of construction.[54] Whatever may be the reason, the west aisle of the transept and the side aisles of the nave rise to the full height of the building. Their arches are naturally very much stilted, and with the main vault rest on piers of quite unusual size and strength. The transverse arches are so large as almost to hide the diagonal ribs and to give the impression that the nave has, after all, a pointed barrel vault. The piers are throughout cross-shaped with a half-shaft on each cardinal face: at the crossing there is also a shaft in the angle, but elsewhere this shaft is replaced by a kind of corbel capital[55] at the very top which carries the diagonal ribs—another proof, as is the size of the transverse arches, that such a ribbed vault was still a half-understood novelty. The most peculiar point about nave piers is the way in which not only the front vaulting shafts but even that portion of the piers to which they are attached is, except in the two western bays, cut off at varying heights from the ground. In the six eastern bays, where the corbels are all at the same level, this was done to leave room for the monks' stalls,[56] but it is difficult to see why, in the case of the following five piers, against which, as at Clairvaux, stood the stalls of the lay brothers, the level of the corbels should vary so much. Now all stalls are gone and the church is very bare and desolate, with nothing but the horrible reredos to detract from that severity and sternness which was what St. Bernard wished to see in all churches of the Order. ([Fig. 25].)

The small chapel to the west of the south transept is the only part of the church, except the later sixteenth-century sacristy, where there is any richness of detail, and there it is confined to the tombs of some of the earlier kings and queens, and especially to those of D. Pedro and the unfortunate Inez de Castro which belongs of course to a much later date.

The windows which are high up the aisle walls are large, round-headed, and perfectly plain. At the transept ends are large round windows filled with plain uncusped circles, and there is another over the west door filled with a rococo attempt at Gothic tracery, which agrees well with the two domed western towers whose details are not even good rococo. Between these towers still opens the huge west door, a very plainly moulded pointed arch of seven orders, resting on the simple capitals of sixteen shafts: a form of door which became very common throughout the fourteenth century. The great cloister was rebuilt later in the time of Dom Diniz, leaving only the chapter-house entrance, which seems even older than the nave. As usual there is one door in the centre, with a large two-light opening on each side: all the arches are round and well moulded, and the capitals simply carved with stiff foliage showing a gradual transition from the earlier romanesque. In the monastery itself, now a barrack, there are still a few vaulted passages which must belong to the original building, but nearly all else has been rebuilt, the main cloister in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and the greater part of the domestic buildings in the eighteenth, so that except for the cloister and sacristy, which will be spoken of later on, there is little worthy of attention.[57]

Now none of these buildings may show any very great originality or differ to any marked degree from contemporary buildings in Spain or even in the south of France, yet to a great extent they fixed a type which in many ways was followed down to the end of the Gothic period. The plan of Braga, Pombeiro, Evora or Coimbra is reproduced with but little change at Guarda, and if the western towers be omitted, at Batalha, some two hundred years later, and the flat paved roofs of Evora occur again at Batalha and at Guarda. The barrel-vaulted nave also long survived, being found as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century in the church of Santa Clara at Coimbra, and even about seventy years later in the church of the Knights of São Thiago at Palmella.

The battlements also of the castle at Guimarães are found not only at Coimbra, but as late as 1336 in the church of Leça do Balio near Oporto, and, modified in shape by the renaissance even in the sixteenth-century churches of Villa do Conde and of Azurara.

Although the distinctively French features of Alcobaça seem to have had but little influence on the further development of building in Portugal, a few peculiarities are found there which are repeated again. For example, the unusually large transverse arches of the nave occur at Batalha, and the large plain western door is clearly related to such later doors as those at Leça do Balio or of São Francisco at Oporto. Again the vaulting of the apse in São João de Alporão is arranged very much in the way which was almost universal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the chancels and side chapels of many a church, such as Santa Maria do Olival at Thomar, or the Graça at Santarem itself, and the curious boat-like corbels of São João are found more than once, as in the choir of the old church, formerly the cathedral of Silves, far south in the Algarve. The large round windows at Evora do not seem to be related to the window at São João, but to be of some independent origin; probably, like the similar windows at Leça and at Oporto, they too belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.

CHAPTER III

THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES DOWN TO THE BATTLE OF ALJUBARROTA

In Portugal the twelfth century is marked by a very considerable activity in building, but the thirteenth, which in France and England saw Gothic architecture rise to a height of perfection both in construction and in ornament which was never afterwards excelled, when more great churches and cathedrals were built than almost ever before or since, seems here to have been the least productive period in the whole history of the country. In the thirteenth century, indeed, Portugal reached its widest European limits, but the energies, alike of the kings and of the people, seem to have been expended rather in consolidating their conquests and in cultivating and inhabiting the large regions of land left waste by the long-continued struggle. Although Dom Sancho's kingdom only extended from the Minho to the Tagus, in the early years of the thirteenth century the rich provinces of Beira, and still more of Estremadura, were very thinly peopled: the inhabitants lived only in walled towns, and their one occupation was fighting, and plunder almost their only way of gaining a living. It is natural then that so few buildings should remain which date from the reigns of Dom Sancho's successors, Affonso ii. (1211-1223), Sancho ii. (1223-1248), and Affonso iii. (1248-1279): the necessary churches and castles had been built at once after the conquest, and the people had neither the leisure nor the means to replace them by larger and more refined structures as was being done elsewhere. Of course some churches described in the last chapter may be actually of that period though belonging artistically and constructionally to an earlier time, as for instance a large part of the cathedral of Evora or the church of São João at Santarem.

São Francisco, Guimarães.