Portuguese Architecture

by Walter Crum Watson

He then speaks of the different reredoses, tombs of two priors, silver candlesticks, a great silver cross made by Eytor Gonsalves, a goldsmith of Lisbon, much other church plate, and then goes on to say that a lectern was ordered for the choir but was not made and was much needed, as was a silver monstrance, and that the monastery had no money to pay Christovam de Figueiredo for painting the great reredos of the high altar and those of the other chapels, 'and, Sir, it is necessary that they should be painted.'

Besides making so many gifts to Sta. Cruz, Dom Manoel endowed it with many privileges. The priors were exempt from the jurisdiction of the bishop, and had themselves complete control over their own dependent churches. All the canons were chaplains to the king, and after the university came back to Coimbra from Lisbon in 1539 Dom João iii. made the priors perpetual chancellors.[135]

By 1522 then the church must have been practically ready, though some carving still had to be done.

Marcos Pires died in 1524 and was succeeded by Diogo de Castilho, and in a letter dated from Evora in that year the king orders a hundred gold cruzados to be paid to Diogo and to Master Nicolas[136] for the statues on the west door which were still wanting, and two years later in September another letter granted Diogo the privilege of riding on a mule.[137]

The interest of the church itself is very inferior to that of the different pieces of church furniture, nearly all the work of foreigners, with which it was adorned, and of which some, though not all, survive to the present day.

Inside there is nothing very remarkable in the structure of the church except the fine vaulting with its many moulded ribs, the large windows with their broken Manoelino heads, and the choir gallery which occupies nearly two bays at the west end. Vaulted underneath, it opens to the church by a large elliptical arch which springs from jambs ornamented with beautiful candelabrum shafts.

Of the outside little is to be seen except the west front, one of the least successful designs of that period.

In the centre—now partly blocked up by eighteenth-century additions, and sunk several feet below the street—is a great moulded arch, about eighteen feet across and once divided into two by a central jamb bearing a figure of Our Lord, whence the door was called 'Portal da Majestade'; above the arch a large round-headed window, deeply recessed, lights the choir gallery, and between it and the top of the arch are three renaissance niches, divided by pilasters, and containing three figures—doubtless some of those for which Diogo de Castilho and Master Nicolas were paid one hundred cruzados in 1524. The window with its mouldings is much narrower than the door, and is joined to the tall pinnacles which rise to the right and left of the great opening by Gothic flying buttresses. Between the side pinnacles and the central mass of the window a curious rounded and bent shaft rises from the hood-mould of the door to end in a semi-classic column between two niches, and from the shaft there grow out two branches to support the corbels on which the niche statues stand. All this is very like the great south door of the Jeronymite monastery at Belem, the work of Diogo's brother João de Castilho; both have a wide door below with a narrower window above, surrounded by a mass of pinnacles and statues, but here the lower door is far too wide, and the upper window too small, and besides the wall is set back a foot or two immediately on each side of the window so that the surface is more broken up. Again, instead of the whole rising up with a great pinnacled niche to pierce the cornice and to dominate parapet and cresting, the drip-mould of the window only gives a few ugly twists, and leaves a blank space between the window head and the straight line of the cornice and parapet; a line in no way improved by the tall rustic cross or the four broken pinnacles which rise above it. Straight crested parapets also crown the wall where it is set back, but at the sides the two corners grow into eight-sided turrets ending in low crocketed stone roofs. Of course the whole front has suffered much from the raising of the street level, but it can never have been beautiful, for the setting back of part of the wall looks meaningless, and the turrets are too small for towers and yet far too large for angle pinnacles. ([Fig. 69].)

Although the soft stone is terribly perished, greater praise can be given to the smaller details, especially to the figures, which show traces of considerable vigour and skill.

If the church shows that Marcos Pires was not a great architect, the cloister still more marks his inferiority to the Fernandes or to João de Castilho, though with its central fountain and its garden it is eminently picturesque. Part of it is now, and probably all once was, of two stories. The buttresses are picturesque, polygonal below, a cluster of rounded shafts above, and are carried up in front of the upper cloister to end in a large cross. All the openings have segmental pointed heads with rather poor mouldings. Each is subdivided into two lights with segmental round heads, supporting a vesica-like opening. All the shafts are round, with round moulded bases and round Manoelino caps. The central shaft has a ring moulding half-way up, and all, including the flat arches and the vesicae, are either covered with leaves, or are twisted into ropes, but without any of that wonderful delicacy which is so striking at Batalha. Across one corner a vault has been thrown covering a fountain, and though elsewhere the ribs are plainly moulded, here they are covered with leaf carving, and altogether make this north-east corner the most picturesque part of the whole cloister. ([Fig. 70].)