So far the design has shown nothing very abnormal; but for one or two renaissance details it is all of good late Gothic, with scarcely any Manoelino features. It is also more pleasing than any other contemporary building in Portugal, and the detail, though very rich, is more restrained. This may be due to the nationality of João de Castilho, for some of the work is almost Spanish, for example the buttresses, the pinnacles, and the door with its trefoiled drip-mould.
If, however, the two eastern bays are good late Gothic, what can be said of the western? Here the fancy of the designer seems to have run quite wild, and here it is that what have been considered to be Indian features are found.
It is hard to believe that João de Castilho, who nowhere, except perhaps in the sacristy door at Alcobaça, shows any love of what is abnormal and outlandish, should have designed these extraordinary details, and so perhaps the local tradition may be so far true, according to which the architect was not João but one Ayres do Quintal. Nothing else seems to be known of Ayres—though a head carved under the west window of the chapter-house is said to be his—but in a country so long illiterate as Portugal, where unwritten stories have been handed down from quite distant times, it is possible that oral tradition may be as true as written records.
Now it is known that João de Castilho was working at Alcobaça in 1519. In 1522 he was busy at Belem, where he may have been since 1517, when for the first time some progress seems to have been made with the building there. What really happened, therefore, may be that when he left Thomar, the Coro was indeed built, and the eastern buttresses finished, but that the carving of the western part was still uncut and so may have been the work of Ayres after João was himself gone.[116] This is, of course, only a conjecture, for Ayres seems to be mentioned in no document, but whoever it was who carved these buttresses and windows was a man of extraordinary originality, and almost mad fancy.
To turn now from the question of the builder to the building itself. The large round buttresses at the west end are fluted at the bottom; at about half their height comes a band of carving about six feet deep seeming to represent a mass of large ropes ending in tasselled fringes or possibly of roots. On one buttress a large chain binds these together, on the others a strap and buckle—probably the Order of the Garter given to Dom Manoel by Henry vii. Above this five large knotty tree-trunks or branches of coral grow up the buttresses uniting in rough trefoiled heads at the top, and having statues between them—Dom Affonso Henriques,
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FIG. 55. Thomar. Convent of Christ. S. Door. |
FIG. 56. Thomar. Outside of W. Window of Chapter House under high Choir in Nave. |
Dom Gualdim Paes, Dom Diniz and Dom Manoel—two on each buttress. Then the buttress becomes eight-sided and smaller, and, surrounded by five thick growths, of which not a square inch is unworked and whose pinnacles are covered with carving, rises with many a strange moulding to a high round pinnacle bearing the cross of the order—a sign, if one may take the coral and the trees to be symbolical of the distant seas crossed and of the new lands visited, of the supreme control exercised by the order over all missions.
Coral-like mouldings too run round the western windows on both north and south sides, and at the bottom these are bound together with basket work.
Strange as are the details of these buttresses, still more strange are the windows of the chapter-house. Since about 1560 the upper cloister of the Filippes has covered the south side of the church so that the south chapter-house window, which now serves as a door, is hidden away in the dark. Still there is light enough to see that in naturalism and in originality it far surpasses anything elsewhere, except the west window of the same chapter-house. Up the jambs grow branches bound round by a broad ribbon. From the spaces between the ribbons there sprout out on either side thick shoots ending in large thistle heads. The top of the opening is low, of complicated curves and fine mouldings, on the outermost of which are cut small curly leaves, but higher up the branches of the jambs with their thistle heads and ribbons with knotted ropes and leaves form a mass of inextricable intricacy, of which little can be seen in the dark except the royal arms.
Inside the vault is Gothic and segmental, but the west window is even more strange than the southern; its inner arch is segmental and there are window seats in the thickness of the wall. The jambs have large round complicated bases of many mouldings, some enriched with leaves, some with thistle heads, some with ribbons, and one with curious projections like small elephants' trunks—in short very much what a Western mind might imagine some Hindu capital, reversed, to be like. On the jamb itself and round the head are three upright mouldings held together by carved basket work of cords, and bearing at intervals thistle heads in threes; beyond is another band of leaf-covered carving, and beyond it an upright strip of wavy lines.[117] The opening has a head like that of the other window and is filled with a bronze grille.