Portuguese Architecture Part 16

The parish church of So Julio at Setubal was built during the early years of the sixteenth century, but was so shattered by the great earthquake of 1755 that only two of the doorways survive of the original building. The western is not of much interest, but that on the north--probably the work of Joo Fenacho who is mentioned as being a well-known carver working at Setubal in 1513--is one of the most elaborate doorways of that period.

The northern side of the church is now a featureless expanse

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 53.

SANTAREM. W. DOOR, MARVILLA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 54.

COIMBRA. UNIVERSITY CHAPEL.]

of whitewashed plaster, scarcely relieved by a few simple square windows up near the cornice; but near the west end, in almost incongruous contrast, the plainness of the plaster is emphasised by the exuberant mouldings and carving of the door. Though in some features related to the doors at Santarem or the Madre de Deus the door here is much more elaborate and even barbaric, but at the same time, being contained within a simple gable-shaped moulding under a plain round arch, with no sprawling projections, the whole design--as is the case with the university chapel at Coimbra--is much more pleasing, and if the large outer twisted shafts with their ogee trefoiled head had been omitted, would even have been really beautiful.

The opening of the door itself has a trefoiled head, whose hollow moulding is enriched with small well-carved roses and flowers. This trefoiled head opens under a round arch, springing from delicate round shafts, shafts and arch-mould being alike enriched with several finely carved rings, while from ring to ring the rounded surface is beautifully wrought with wonderful minutely carved spirals. The bases and caps of these, as of the other larger shafts, are of the usual Manoelino type, round with a hollow eight-sided abacus. Beyond these shafts and their arch, rather larger shafts, ringed in the same way and carved with a delicate diaper, support a larger arch, half-octagonal in shape and with convex sides, all ornamented like its supports, while all round this and outside it there runs a broad band of foliage, half Gothic, half renaissance in character. Beyond these again are the large shafts with their ogee trefoiled arch, which though they spoil the beauty of the design, at the same time do more than all the rest to give that strange character which it possesses. These shafts are much larger than the others, indeed they are made up of several round mouldings twisted together each of the same size as the shaft next them. Base and capital are of course also much larger, and there is only one ring ornament, above which the twisting is reversed. All the mouldings are carved, some with spirals, some with bundles of leaves bound round by a rope, with bunches of grape-like fruit between. The twisted mouldings are carried up beyond the capitals to form a huge trefoil turning up at the top to a large and rather clumsy finial. In this case the upright shafts at the sides are not twisted as in the other doors; they are square in plan, interrupted by a moulding at the level of the capitals, below which they are carved on each face with large square flowers, while above they have a round moulding at the angles. At the top are plain Gothic pinnacles; behind which rises the enclosing arch, due doubtless to the restoration after the earthquake. The gable-shaped moulding runs from the base of these pinnacles to the top of the ogee, and forms the boundary between the stonework and the plaster.

Such then is the Manoelino in its earlier forms, and there can be little doubt that it was gradually evolved from a union of late Gothic and Moorish, owing some peculiarities such as twisted shafts, rounded mouldings, and coupled windows to Moorish, and to Gothic others such as its flowery finials. The curious outlines of its openings may have been derived, the simpler from Gothic, the more complex from Moorish. Steps are wanting to show whence came the sudden growth of naturalism, but it too probably came from late Gothic, which had already provided crockets, finials and carved bands of foliage so that it needed but little change to connect these into one growing plant. Sometimes these Manoelino designs, as in the palace at Cintra, are really beautiful when the parts are small and do not straggle all over the surface, but sometimes as in the Marvilla door at Santarem, or in that of the convent of the Madre de Deus at Lisbon, the mouldings are so clumsy and the design so sprawling and ill-connected, that they can only be looked on as curiosities of architectural aberration.

CHAPTER XI

THOMAR AND THE CONQUEST OF INDIA

Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon in July 1497 with a small fleet to try and make his way to India by sea, and he arrived at Calicut on the Malabar coast nearly a year later, in May 1598. He and his men were well received by the zamorim or ruler of the town--then the most important trade centre in India--and were much helped in their intercourse by a renegade native of Seville who acted as interpreter. After a stay of about two months he started for home with his ships laden with spices, and with a letter to Dom Manoel in which the zamorim said:--

'Vasco da Gama, a n.o.bleman of thy household, has visited my kingdom, and has given me great pleasure. In my kingdom is abundance of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones; what I seek from thy country is gold, silver, coral and scarlet.'[108]

Arriving at Lisbon in July 1499, Vasco da Gama met with a splendid reception from king and people; was given 20,000 gold cruzados, a pension of 500 cruzados a year, and the t.i.tle of Dom; while provision was also made for the families of those who had perished during the voyage; for out of one hundred and forty-eight who started two years earlier only ninety-six lived to see Lisbon again.

So valuable were spices in those days that the profit to the king on this expedition, after all expenses had been paid and all losses deducted, was reckoned as being in the proportion of sixty to one.

No wonder then that another expedition was immediately organised by Dom Manoel. This armada--in which the largest ship was of no more than four hundred tons--sailed from Lisbon under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral on March 9, 1500. Being driven out of his course, Cabral after many days saw a high mountain which he took to be an island, but sailing on found that it was part of a great continent. He landed, erected a cross, and took possession of it in the name of his king, thus securing Brazil for Portugal. One ship was sent back to Lisbon with the news, and the rest turned eastwards to make for the Cape of Good Hope. Four were sunk by a great gale, but the rest arrived at Calicut on September 13th.

Here he too was well received by the zamorim and built a factory, but this excited the anger of the Arab traders, who burned it, killing fifty Portuguese. Cabral retorted by burning part of the town and sailed south to Cochin, whose ruler, a va.s.sal of the zamorim, was glad to receive the strangers and to accept their help against his superior. Thence he soon sailed homewards with the three ships which remained out of his fleet of thirteen.

In 1502 Dom Manoel received from the Pope Alexander VI. the t.i.tle of 'Lord of Navigation, conquests and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India,' and sent out another great expedition under Vasco da Gama, who, however, with his lieutenant, Vicente Sodre, found legitimate trade less profitable than the capture of pilgrim ships going to and from Mecca, which they rifled and sank with all on board. From the first thus treated they took 12,000 ducats in money and 10,000 ducats' worth in goods, and then blew up the ship with 240 men besides women and children.

Reaching Calicut, the town was again bombarded and sacked, since the zamorim would not or could not expel all the Arab merchants, the richest of his people.

Other expeditions followed every year till in 1509 a great Mohammedan fleet led by the 'Mirocem, the Grand Captain of the Sultan of Grand Cairo and of Babylon,' was defeated off the island of Diu, and next year the second viceroy, Affonso de Albuquerque, moved the seat of the government from Cochin to Goa, which, captured and held with some difficulty, soon became one of the richest and most splendid cities of the East.

Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and the great depot of Persian trade had been captured in 1509, and it was not long before the Portuguese had penetrated to the Straits of Malacca and even to China and j.a.pan.

So within twelve years from the time of Vasco da Gama's voyage the foundations of the Portuguese empire in the East had been firmly laid--an empire which, however, existed merely as a great trading concern in which Dom Manoel was practically sole partner and so soon became the richest sovereign of his time.

Seeing therefore how close the intercourse was between Lisbon and India,[109] it is perhaps no wonder that, in his very interesting book on the Renaissance Architecture of Portugal, Albrecht Haupt, struck by the very strange forms used at Thomar and to a lesser degree in the later additions to Batalha, propounded a theory that this strangeness was directly due to the importation of Indian details. That the discovery of a sea route to India had a great influence on the architecture of Portugal cannot be denied, for the direct result of this discovery was to fill the coffers of a splendour-loving king with what was, for the time, untold wealth, and so to enable him to cover the country with innumerable buildings; but tempting as it would be to accept Haupt's theory, it is surely more reasonable to look nearer home for the origin of these peculiar features, and to see in them only the culmination of the Manoelino style and the product of an even more exuberant fancy than that possessed by any other contemporary builder.

Of course, when looking for parallels with such a special object in view it is easy enough to find them, and to see resemblances between the cloister windows at Batalha and various screens or panels at Ahmedabad; and when we find that a certain Thomas Fernandes[110] had been sent to India in 1506 as military engineer and architect; that another Fernandes, Diogo of Beja, had in 1513 formed part of an emba.s.sy sent to Gujerat and so probably to the capital Ahmedabad; and that Fernandes was also the name of the architects of Batalha, it becomes difficult not to connect these separate facts together and to jump to the quite unwarrantable conclusion that the four men of the same name may have been related and that one of them, probably Diogo, had given his kinsmen sketches or descriptions on which they founded their designs.[111]

With regard to Thomar, where the detail is even more curious and Indian-looking, the temptation to look for Indian models is still stronger, owing to the peculiar position which the Order of Christ at Thomar now held, for the knights of that order had for some time possessed complete spiritual jurisdiction over India and all other foreign conquests.

This being so, it might have seemed appropriate enough for Dom Manoel to decorate the additions he made to the old church with actual Indian detail, as his builder did with corals and other symbols of the strange discoveries then made. The fact also that on the stalls at Santa Cruz in Coimbra are carved imaginary scenes from India and from Brazil might seem to be in favour of the Indian theory, but the towns and forests there depicted are exactly what a mediaeval artist would invent for himself, and are not at all like what they were supposed to represent, and so, if they are to be used in the argument at all, would rather go to show how little was actually known of what India was like.

There seems also not to be even a tradition that anything of the sort was done, and if a tradition has survived about the stalls at Coimbra, surely, had there been one, it might have survived at Thomar as well.

At the same time it must be admitted that the bases of the jambs inside the west window in the chapter-house are very unlike anything else, and are to a Western eye like Indian work. However, a most diligent search in the Victoria and Albert Museum through endless photographs of Indian buildings failed to find anything which was really at all like them, and this helped to confirm the belief that this resemblance is more fancied than real; besides, the other strange features, the west window outside, and the south window, now a door, are surely nothing more than Manoelino realism gone a little mad.

Thomar has already been seen in the twelfth century when Dom Gualdim Paes built the sixteen-sided church and the castle, and when he and his Templars withstood the Moorish invaders with such success.

As time went on the Templars in other lands became rich and powerful, and in the fourteenth century Philippe le Bel of France determined to put an end to them as an order and to confiscate their goods. So in 1307 the grand master was imprisoned, and five years later the Council of Vienne, presided over by Clement V.--a Frenchman, Bertrand de Goth--suppressed the order. Philippe seized their property, and in 1314 the grand master was burned.

In Portugal their services against the Moors were still remembered, and although by this time no part of Portugal was under Mohammedan rule, Granada was not far off, and Morocco was still to some extent a danger.

Dom Diniz therefore determined not to exterminate the Templars, but to change them into a new military order, so in 1319 he obtained a bull from John XXII. from Avignon const.i.tuting the Order of Christ. At first their headquarters were at Castro-Marim at the mouth of the Guadiana, but soon they returned to their old Templar stronghold at Thomar and were re-granted most of their old possessions.

The Order of Christ soon increased in power, and under the administration of Prince Henry, 1417 to 1460, took a great part in the discoveries and explorations which were to bring such wealth and glory to their country. In 1442, Eugenius IV. confirmed the spiritual jurisdiction of the order over all conquests in Africa, and Nicholas V.

and Calixtus III. soon extended this to all other conquests made, or to be made anywhere, so that the knights had spiritual authority over them 'as if they were in Thomar itself.' This boon was obtained by Dom Affonso V. at his uncle Prince Henry's wish.

When Prince Henry died he was succeeded as duke of Vizeu and as governor of the order by his nephew Fernando, the second son of Dom Duarte.

Fernando died ten years later and was succeeded by his elder son Diogo, who was murdered fifteen years later by Dom Joo II. in 1485. Then the t.i.tle pa.s.sed to his brother Dom Manoel, and with it the administration of the order, a position which he retained when he ascended the throne, and which has since belonged to all his successors.

Prince Henry finding that the old Templar church with its central altar was unsuited to the religious services of the order, built a chapel or small chancel out from one of the eastern sides and dedicated it to St.

Thomas of Canterbury. But as the order advanced in wealth and in power this addition was found to be far too small, and in a general chapter held by Dom Manoel in 1492 it was determined to build a new Coro large enough to hold all the knights and leaving the high altar in its old place in the centre of the round church.

In all the Templar churches in England, when more room was wanted, a chancel was built on to the east, so that the round part, instead of containing the altar, has now become merely a nave or a vestibule. At Thomar, however, probably because it was already common to put the stalls in a gallery over the west door, it was determined to build the new Coro to the west, and this was done by breaking through the two westernmost sides of the sixteen-sided building and inserting a large pointed arch.

Although it was decided to build in 1492, little or nothing can have been done for long, if it is true that Joo de Castilho who did the work was only born about the year 1490; and that he did it is certain, as he says himself that he 'built the Coro, the chapter-house--under the Coro--the great arch of the church, and the princ.i.p.al door.'

Two stone carvers, Alvaro Rodrigues and Diogo de Arruda, were working there in 1512 and 1513, and the stalls were begun in July 1511, so that some progress must have been made by them. If then Joo de Castilho did the work he must have been born some time before 1490, as he could hardly have been entrusted with such a work when a boy of scarcely twenty.

Joo de Castilho, who is said to have been by birth a Biscayan, soon became the most famous architect of his time. He not only was employed on this Coro, but was afterwards summoned to superintend the great Jeronymite monastery of Belem, which he finished. Meanwhile he was charged by Joo III. with the building of the vast additions made necessary at Thomar when in 1523 the military order was turned into a body of monks. He lived long enough to become a complete convert to the renaissance, for at Belem the Gothic framework is all overlaid with renaissance detail, while in his latest additions at Thomar no trace of Gothic has been left. He died shortly before 1553, as we learn from a doc.u.ment dated January 1st of that year, which states that his daughter Maria de Castilho then began, on the death of her father, to receive a pension of 20,000 reis.

The new Coro is about eighty-five feet long inside by thirty wide, and is of three bays. Standing, as does the Templars' church, on the highest point of the hill, it was, till the erection of the surrounding cloisters, clear of any buildings. Originally the round church, being part of the fortifications, could only be entered from the north, but the first thing done by Dom Manoel was to build on the south side a large platform or terrace reached from the garden on the east by a great staircase. This terrace is now bounded on the west by the Cloister dos Filippes, on the south by a high wall and by the chapter-house, begun by Dom Manoel but never finished, and on the north by the round church and by one bay of the Coro; and in this bay is now the chief entrance to the church. The lower part of the two western bays is occupied by the chapter-house, with one window looking west over the cloister of Santa Barbara, and one south, now hidden by the upper Cloister dos Filippes and used as a door. [See plan p. 225.]

Inside, the part over the chapter-house is raised to form the choir, and there, till they were burned in 1810 by the French for firewood, stood the splendid stalls begun in July 1511 by Olivel of Ghent who had already made stalls for So Francisco at Evora.[112] The stalls had large figures carved on their backs, a continuous canopy, and a high and elaborate cresting, while in the centre on the west side the Master's stall ended in a spire which ran up with numberless pinnacles, ribs and finials to a large armillary sphere just under the vaulting.[113] Now the inside is rather bare, with no ornament beyond the intricacy of the finely moulded ribs and the elaborate corbels from which they spring.

These are a ma.s.s of carving, armillary spheres, acanthus leaves, shields upheld by well-carved figures, crosses, and at the top small cherubs holding the royal crown.

The inner side of the door has a segmental head and on either jamb are tall twisted shafts. A moulded string course running round just above the level once reached by the top of the stalls turns up over the window as a hood-mould.

At the same time much was done to enrich the old Templars' church. All the shafts were covered with gilt diaper and the capitals with gold; crockets were fixed to the outer sides of the pointed arches of the central octagon, and inside it were placed figures of saints standing on Gothic corbels under canopies of beautiful tabernacle work. Similar statues stand on the vaulting shafts of the outer polygon and between them, filling in the s.p.a.ces below the round-headed windows, are large paintings in the Flemish style common to all Portuguese pictures of that time--of the Nativity, of the Visit of the Magi, of the Annunciation, and of the Virgin and Child.

To-day the only part of the south side visible down to the ground level is the eastern bay in which opens the great door. This is one of the works which Joo de Castilho claims as his, and on one of the jambs there is carved a strap, held by two lion's paws on which are some letters supposed to be his signature, and some figures which have been read as 1515, probably wrongly, for there seems to have been no renaissance work done in Portugal except by Sansovino till the coming of Master Nicolas to Belem in 1517 or later.[114] If it is 1515 and gives the date, it must mean the year when the mere building was finished, not the carving, for the renaissance band can hardly have been done till after his return from Belem.

The doorway is one of great beauty, indeed is one of the most beautiful pieces of work in the kingdom. The opening itself is round-headed with three bands of carving running all round it, separated by slender shafts of which the outermost up to the springing of the arch is a beautiful spiral with four-leaved flowers in the hollows. Of the carved bands the innermost is purely renaissance, with candelabra, medallions, griffins and leaves all most beautifully cut in the warm yellow limestone. On the next band are large curly leaves still Gothic in style and much undercut; and in the last, four-leaved flowers set some distance one from the other.

At the top, the drip-mould grows into a large trefoil with crockets outside and an armillary sphere within. At the sides tall thin b.u.t.tresses end high above the door in sharp carved pinnacles and bear under elaborate canopies many figures of saints.[115] Two other pinnacles rise from the top of the arch, and between them are more saints. In the middle stands Our Lady, and from her canopy a curious broken and curving moulding runs across the other pinnacles and canopies to the sides.