At Funchal the roof is on a larger scale: there is no division into squares, but the rafters are knotted together with much greater elaboration, and the flat part is like the chapel roof at Cintra, entirely covered with interlacing strips forming an intricate pattern round hollow octagons.
Sala dos Cysnes, Cintra.
The simple boarding of the earlier roofs may well have led to the two wonderful ceilings at Cintra, those in the Sala dos Cysnes, and in the Sala dos Brazões or dos Escudos, but the idea of the many octagons in the Sala dos Cysnes may have come from some such roof as that at Caminha, when the octagons are so important a feature of the design. In that hall swans may have first been painted for Dom João, but the roof has clearly been remade since then, possibly under Dom Manoel. The gilt ornament on the mouldings seem even later, but may of course have been added afterwards, though it is not very unlike some of the carving on the roof at Caminha, an undoubted work of Dom Manoel's time.
This great roof in the Swan Hall has a deep and projecting classical cornice; it is divided into three equal parts, two sloping and one flat, with the slopes returned at the ends. The whole is made up of twenty-three large octagons and of four other rather distorted ones in the corners, all surrounded with elaborate mouldings, carved and gilt like the cornice. From the square or three-sided spaces left between the octagons there project from among acanthus leaves richly carved and gilt pendants.
In each of the twenty-seven octagons there is painted on a flat-boarded ground a large swan, each wearing on its neck the red velvet and gold collar made by Dona Isabel for the real swans in the tank outside. These paintings, which are very well done, certainly seem to belong to the seventeenth century, for the trees and water are not at all like the work of an artist of Dom Manoel's time. ([Fig. 50].)
Sala dos Escudos, Cintra.
Even more remarkable is the roof of the Sala dos Brazões or dos Escudos—that is 'of the shields'—also built by Dom Manoel, and also retouched at the same time as that in the Sala dos Cysnes. This other hall is a large room over forty feet square. The cornice begins about twelve feet from the ground, the walls being covered with hunting scenes on blue and white tiles of about the end of the seventeenth century. The cornice, about three feet deep and of considerable projection, is, like all the mouldings, painted blue and enriched with elaborate gilt carving. On the frieze is the following inscription in large gilt letters:
Pois com esforços leais
Serviços foram ganhadas
Com estas e outras tais
Devem de ser comservadas.[100]
The inscription is interrupted by brackets, round which the cornice is returned, and on which rest round arches thrown across the four corners, bringing the whole to an equal-sided octagon.
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FIG. 49. Caminha. Roof of Matriz. |
FIG. 50. Palace, Cintra. Sala dos Cysnes. |