Portuguese Architecture

by Walter Crum Watson

The wall-tiles of the dining-room are like those of the Sala das Sereias, but end in a splendid cresting. The ceiling is modern and uninteresting.

Next to the north comes the servery, a room without interest but for its window which looks west, and is like the two older dining-room windows.

Returning to the Sala das Sereias, a spiral stair leads down to the central pateo, which can also be reached from the porch in the south-west corner. All along the south side runs the tank made by Dom João for his daughter's swans, and on three sides are beautiful white marble windows. At the east end of the north side three open arches lead to the bathroom. As is the case with the windows, the three arches are enclosed in a square frame. The capitals, however, are different, having an eight-sided bell on which rests a square block with a bud carved at each angle, and above an abacus, moulded all round. The arches are cusped like the windows, but are stilted and segmental. Inside is a recess framed in an arch of Dom Manoel's time, and from all over the tiled walls and the ceiling jets of water squirt out, so that the whole becomes a great shower-bath, delightful and cooling on a hot day but rather public. In the middle of the pateo there stands a curious column—not at all unlike the 'pelourinho'[95] of Cintra—which stands in a basin just before the entrance gate. This column is formed of three twisted shafts on whose capitals sit a group of boys holding three shields charged with the royal arms. All round the court is a dado of white and green tiles arranged in an Arab pattern.

In the north-west corner and reached by the same spiral stair, but at a higher level than the Sala das Sereias, is the Sala dos Arabes, so called because it is commonly believed to be a part of the original building. The walls may be so, but of the rest, nothing, but perhaps the shallow round fountain basin in the middle and the square of tiles which surrounds it, now so worn that little of their glazed surface is left. The walls half-way up are lined with tiles, squares and parallelograms, blue, white and green. The doors are framed in different tiles, and all are finished with an elaborate cresting. The most interesting thing in the room is the circular basin in the middle—a basin which gives it a truly Eastern look. Inside a round shallow hollow there stands a many-sided block of marble about six inches high. The sides are concave as in a small section of a Doric column, and within it is hollowed into a beautiful cup, shaped somewhat like a flower of many petals. In the middle there now is a strange object of gilt metal through which the water once poured. On a short stem stands a carefully modelled dish on which rest first leaves, like long acanthus leaves, then between them birds on whose backs sit small figures of boys. Between the boys and above the leaves are more figures exactly like seated Indian gods, and the whole ends in a cone. It is so completely Indian in appearance that there can be little doubt but that it is really of Indian origin, and perhaps it is not too much to see in it part of the spoils brought to Dom Manoel by Vasco da Gama after he had in 1498 made his way round Africa to Calicut and back.

Returning to the Sala das Sereias and passing through the servery and another room an open court is reached called the Pateo de Diana, from a fountain over which Diana presides, and on to which one of the dining-room windows looks. A beautifully tiled stair—these tiles are embossed like those of the dining-room, but besides vine-leaves some have on them bunches of grapes—goes down from the Court of Diana to the Court of the Lion, the Pateo do Leão, where a lion spouts into a long tank. But the chief beauty of these two courts is a small window which overlooks them. This window is only of one light, and like the dining-room window near it its framing has Gothic bases. The capitals are smaller than in the other windows, and the framing partly covers the outer moulding of the window arch, making it look like a segment of a circle. But the cusps are the most curious part. They form four more or less trefoiled spaces with wavy outlines, and two of them—not the remaining one at the top—end in large well-carved vine-leaves, very like those at the ends of the cusps on the arches in the Capella do Fundador at Batalha. To add to the charm of the window, the space between the top of the arch and the framing is filled in with those beautiful tiles embossed with vine-leaves.

Going up again to the Sala dos Arabes, a door in the northern wall leads to a passage running northwards to the chapel. About half-way along the passage another branches off to the right towards the great kitchen.

The chapel stands at the northern edge of the palace buildings, having beyond it a terrace called the Terreiro da Meca or of Mecca; partly from this name, and partly from the tiles which still cover the middle of the floor it is believed that the chapel stands exactly on the site of the Walis' private mosque, with perhaps the chancel added.

The middle of the nave—the chapel consists of a nave and chancel, two small transeptal recesses, and two galleries one above the other at the west end—is paved with tiles once glazed and of varying colours, but now nearly all worn down till the natural red shows through. The pattern has been elaborate; a broad border of diagonal checks surrounding a narrow oblong in which the checks are crossed by darker lines so as to form octagons, and between the outer border and the octagons a band of lighter ground down which in the middle runs a coloured line having on each side cones of the common Arab pattern exactly like the palace battlements.

Now the walls are bare and white, but were once covered with frescoes of the fifteenth century; the reredos is a clumsy addition of the eighteenth century.

The cornice and the long pilasters at the entrance to the chancel seem to have been added at the same time, but the windows and ceiling are still those of Dom João's time. The windows—there are now three, a fourth in the chancel having been turned into a royal pew—are of two or three lights, have commonplace tracery, and are only interesting as being one of the few wholly Gothic features in the palace.