Below these large corbels, on which are carved large angels, are two smaller niches with figures, one on each side of the twisted shaft. Renaissance curves form the heads of these as they do of larger niches, one on each side of the Holy Family above, which contain the Annunciation and the Visit of the Wise Men.
Beyond Dom Manoel and his wife are square shafts with more niches and figures, and beyond them again flatter niches, half Manoelino, half renaissance. The rest of the west front above the ruined porch is plain except for a large round window lighting the choir gallery. The north-west tower does not rise above the roof.
Outside, the church as a whole is neither well proportioned nor graceful. The great mass of the transept is too overwhelming, the nave not long enough, and above all, the large windows of the nave too large. It would have looked much better had they been only the size of the smaller windows lighting the choir gallery—omitting the one below, and this would further have had the advantage of not cutting up the beautiful band of ornament. But the weakest part of the whole design are the towers, which must always have been too low, and yet would have been too thin for the massive building behind them had they been higher. Now, of course, the one finished with a dome has nothing to recommend it, neither height, nor proportion, nor design. Yet the doorway taken by itself, or together with the bay on either side, is a very successful composition, and on a brilliantly sunny day so blue is the sky and so white the stone that hardly any one would venture to criticise it for being too elaborate and over-charged, though no doubt it might seem so were the stone dingy and the sky grey and dull.
The church of Belem may be ill-proportioned and unsatisfactory outside, but within it is so solemn and vast as to fill one with surprise. Compared with many churches the actual area is not really very great nor is it very high, yet there is perhaps no other building which gives such an impression of space and of freedom. Entering from the brilliant sunlight it seems far darker than, with large windows, should be the case, and however hideous the yellow-and-blue checks with which they are filled may be, they have the advantage of keeping out all brilliant light; the huge transept too is not well lit and gives that feeling of vastness and mystery which, as the supports are few and slender, would otherwise be wanting, while looking westwards the same result is obtained by the dark cavernous space under the gallery. ([Fig. 65].)
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FIG. 64. Belem South Side of Church of Jeronymos. |
FIG. 65. Belem Nave of Church looking West. |
On the south side the walls are perfectly plain, broken only by the windows, whose jambs are enriched with empty niches; on the north the small windows are placed very high up, the twisted vaulting shafts only come down a short way to a string course some way below the windows, leaving a great expanse of cliff-like wall. At the bottom are the confessional doors, so small that they add greatly to the scale, and above them tall narrow niches and their canopies. But the nave piers are the most astonishing part of the whole building. Not more than three feet thick, they rise up to a height of nearly seventy feet to support a great stone vault. Four only of the six stand clear from floor to roof, for the two western are embedded at the bottom in the jambs of the gallery arches. From their capitals the vaulting ribs spread out in every direction, being constructively not unlike an English fan vault, and covering the whole roof with a network of lines. The piers are round, stand on round moulded pedestals, and are divided into narrow strips by eight small shafts. The height is divided into four nearly equal parts by well-moulded rings, encircling the whole pier, and in the middle of the second of these divisions are corbels and canopies for statues. The capitals are round and covered with leaves, but scarcely exceed the piers in diameter. Besides all this each strip between the eight thin shafts is covered from top to bottom—except where the empty niches occur—with carving in slight relief, either foliage or, more usually, renaissance arabesques.
Larger piers stand next the transept, cross-shaped, formed of four of the thinner piers set together, and about six feet thick. They are like the others, except that there are corbels and canopies for statues in the angles, and that a capital is formed by a large moulding carved with what is meant for egg and tongue. From this, well moulded and carved arches, round in the central and pointed in the side aisles, cross the nave from side to side, dividing its vault from that of the transept.
This transept vault, perhaps the largest attempted since the days of the Romans—for it covers a space measuring about ninety-five feet by sixty-five—is three bays long from north to south and two wide from east to west; formed of innumerable ribs springing from these points—of which those at the north and south ends are placed immediately above the arches leading to the chapels—it practically assumes in the middle the shape of a flat oblong dome.
Now, though the walls are thick, there are no buttresses, and the skill and daring required to build a vault sixty-five feet wide and about a hundred feet high resting on side walls on one side and on piers scarcely six feet thick on the other must not only excite the admiration of every one, especially when it is remembered that no damage was caused by the great earthquake which shook Lisbon to pieces in 1755, but must also raise the wish that what has been so skilfully done here had been also done in the Capellas Imperfeitas at Batalha.
At the north end of the main transept are two doors, one leading to the cloister and one to the sacristy. A straight and curved moulding surrounds their trefoil heads under a double twining hood-mould. Outside, other mouldings rise high above the whole to form a second large trefoil, whose hood-mould curves into two great crocketed circles before rising to a second ogee.