The large door has a round arch with uprights at the sides rising to a horizontal crested moulding. Below, these uprights have a band of renaissance carving on the outer side, and in front a canopied niche with a well-modelled figure. Above they become semicircular and end in sphere-bearing spirelets. The great round arch is filled with two orders of mouldings, one a broad strip of arabesque, the other a series of kneeling angels below and of arabesque above. The actual openings are formed of two round-headed arches whose outer mouldings cross each other on the central jamb. Above them are two reversed semicircles, and then a great tympanum carved with a figure of Our Lady sheltering popes, bishops, and saints under her robe: a carving which seems to have lately taken the place of a large window. ([Fig. 68].)
As it now stands the front is not pleasing. It is too wide, and the great spreading pediment is very ugly. Of course it ought not to be judged by its present appearance, and yet it must be admitted that the windows are too large and come too near the ground, and that much of the detail is coarse. Still it is of interest if only because it is the only surviving building closely related to the church of Belem. Built perhaps to commemorate the expulsion of the Jews, it shared the fate of the Jesuits who instigated the expulsion, and was destroyed only a few years before they were driven from the country by the Marques de Pombal.
CHAPTER XIV
THE COMING OF THE FOREIGN ARTISTS
If João de Castilho and his brother Diogo were really natives of one of the Basque provinces, they might rightly be included among the foreign artists who played such an important part in Portugal towards the end of Dom Manoel's reign and the beginning of that of his son, Dom João iii. Yet the earlier work of João de Castilho at Thomar shows little trace of that renaissance influence which the foreigners, and especially the Frenchmen, were to do so much to introduce.
Santa Cruz, Coimbra.
A great house of the Canon Regular of St. Augustine had been founded at Coimbra by Dom Affonso Henriques for his friend São Theotonio in 1131. But with the passage of centuries the church and monastic building of Sta. Cruz had become dilapidated, and were no longer deemed worthy of so wealthy and important a body. So in 1502 Dom Manoel determined to rebuild them and to adorn the church, and it was for this adorning that he summoned so many sculptors in stone and in wood to his aid.
The first architect of the church was Marcos Pires, to whom are due the cloister and the whole church except the west door, which was finished by his successor Diogo de Castilho with the help of Master Nicolas, a Frenchman.
One Gregorio Lourenço seems to have been what would now be called master of the works, and from his letters to Dom Manoel we learn how the work was going on. After Dom Manoel's death in 1521 he writes to Dom João iii., telling him what, of all the many things his father the late king had ordered, was already finished and what was still undone.
The church consists of a nave of four bays, measuring some 105 feet by 39, with flanking chapels, the whole lined with eighteenth-century tiles, mostly blue and white. There are also a great choir gallery at the west end, a chancel, polygonal