Portuguese Architecture Part 28

Of these the great earthquake of 1755 almost entirely destroyed the first two and knocked down the dome of the last.

[Sidenote: So Vicente de Fora.]

Though not the first to be built, So Vicente being the least injured may be taken before the others. It is a large church, being altogether about 236 feet long by 75 wide, and consists of a nave of three bays with connected chapels on each side, a transept with the fallen dome at the crossing, a square chancel, a retro-choir for the monks about 45 feet deep behind the chancel, and to the west a porch between two tall towers.

On the south side are two large square cloisters of no great interest with a sacristy between--in which all the kings of the House of Braganza lie in velvet-covered coffins--and the various monastic buildings now inhabited by the patriarch of Lisbon.

The outside is plain, except for the west front, which stands at the top of a great flight of steps. On the west front two orders of pilasters are placed one above the other. Of these the lower is Doric, of more slender proportions than usual, while the upper has no true capitals beyond the projecting entablature and corbels on the frieze. Single pilasters divide the centre of the front into three equal parts and coupled pilasters stand at the corners of the towers. In the central part three plain arches open on to the porch, with a pedimented niche above each. In the tower the niches are placed lower with oblong openings above and below.

Above the entablature of the lower order there are three windows in the middle flanked by Ionic pilasters and surmounted by pediments, while in the tower are large round-headed niches with pediments. (Fig. 93.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF SO VICENTE]

The entablature of the upper order is carried straight across the whole front, with nothing above it in the centre but a bal.u.s.trading interrupted by obelisk-bearing pedestals, but at the ends the towers rise in one more square story flanked with short Doric pilasters.

Round-arched openings for bells occur on each side, and within the crowning bal.u.s.trade with its obelisks a stone dome rises to an eight-sided domed lantern.

Like all the church, the front is built of beautiful limestone, rivalling Carrara marble in whiteness, and seen down the narrow street which runs uphill from across the small _praca_ the whole building is most imposing. It would have been even more satisfactory had the central part been a little narrower, and had there been something to mark the barrel vault within; the omission too of the lower order, which is so much taller than the upper, would have been an improvement, but even with these defects the design is most stately, and refreshingly free of all the fussy over-elaboration and the fantastic piling up of pediments which soon became too common.

But if the outside deserves such praise, the inside is worthy of far more. The great stone barrel vault is simply coffered with square panels. The chapel arches are singularly plain, and spring from a good moulding which projects nearly

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 93.

LISBON.

SO VICENTE DE FORA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 94.

LISBON.

SO VICENTE DE FORA.]

to the face of the pilasters. Two of these stand between each chapel, and have very beautiful capitals founded on the Doric but with a long fluted neck ornamented in front by a bunch of crossed arrows and at the corners with acanthus leaves, and with egg and tongue carved on the moulding below the Corinthian abacus. Of the entablature, only the frieze and architrave is broken round the pilasters; for the cornice with its great mutules runs straight round the whole church, supported over the chapels by carving out the triglyphs--of which there is one over each pilaster, and two in the s.p.a.ce between each pair of pilasters--so as to form corbels.

Only the pendentives of the dome and the panelled drum remain; the rest was replaced after the earthquake by wooden ceiling pierced with skylights. (Fig. 94.)

Though so simple--there is no carved ornament except in the beautiful capitals--the interior is one of the most imposing to be seen anywhere, and though not really very large gives a wonderful impression of s.p.a.ce and size, being in this respect one of the most successful of cla.s.sic churches. It is only necessary to compare So Vicente de Fora with the great clumsy cathedral which Herrera had begun to build five years earlier at Valladolid to see how immensely superior Terzi was to his Spanish contemporary. Even in his masterpiece, the church of the Escorial, Herrera did not succeed in giving such s.p.a.cious greatness, for, though half as large again, the Escorial church is imposing rather from its stupendous weight and from the ma.s.siveness of its granite piers than from the beauty of its proportions.

Philip took a great interest in the building of the Escorial, and also had the plans of So Vicente submitted to him in 1590. This plan, signed by him in November 1590, was drawn by Joo Nunes Tinouco, so that it is possible that Tinouco was the actual designer and not Terzi, but Tinouco was still alive sixty years later when he published a plan of Lisbon, and so must have been very young in 1590. It is probable, therefore, that tradition is right in a.s.signing So Vicente to Terzi, and even if it be actually the work of Tinouco, he has here done little but copy what his master had already done elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Lisbon, Santo Anto.]

After So Roque the first church begun by Terzi was Santo Anto, now attached to the hospital of So Jose. Begun in 1579 it was not finished till 1652, only to be destroyed by the earthquake in 1755. As at So Vicente, the west front has a lower order of huge Doric pilasters nearly fifty feet high. There is no porch, but three doors with poor windows above which look as if they had been built after the earthquake.

Unfortunately, nearly all above the lower entablature is gone, but enough is left to show that the upper order was Ionic and very short, and that the towers were to rise behind b.u.t.tress-like curves descending from the central part to two obelisks placed above the coupled corner pilasters.

The inside was almost exactly like So Vicente, but larger.

[Sidenote: Lisbon, Santa Maria do Desterro.]

Santa Maria do Desterro was begun later than either of the last two, in 1591. Unlike them the two orders of the west front are short and of almost equal size, Doric below and Ionic above. The arches of the porch reach up to the lower entablature, and the windows above are rather squat; it looks as if there was to have been a third order above, but it is all gone.

The inside was of the usual pattern, except that the pilasters were not coupled between the chapels, that they were panelled, and that above the low chapel arches there are square windows looking into a gallery.

[Sidenote: Torreo do Paco.]

Besides these churches Terzi built for Philip a large addition to the royal palace in the shape of a great square tower or pavilion, called the Torreo. The palace then stood to the west of what is now called the Praca do Commercio, and the Torreo jutted out over the Tagus. It seems to have had five windows on the longer and four on the shorter sides, to have been two stories in height, and to have been covered by a great square dome-shaped roof, with a lantern at the top and turrets at the corners. Pilasters stood singly between each window and in pairs at the corners, and the windows all had pediments. Now, not a stone of it is left, as it was in the palace square, the Terreno do Paco da Ribeira, that the earthquake was at its worst, swallowing up the palace and overwhelming thousands of people in the waves of the river.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Se Nova.]

Meanwhile the great Jesuit church at Coimbra, now the Se Nova or new cathedral, had been gradually rising. Founded by Dom Joo III. in 1552, and dedicated to the Onze mil Virgems, it cannot have been begun in its present form till much later, till about 1580, while the main, or south, front seems even later still.[164]

Inside, the church consists of a nave of four bays with side chapels--in one of which there is a beautiful Manoelino font--transepts and chancel with a drumless dome over the crossing. In some respects the likeness to So Vicente is very considerable; there are coupled Doric pilasters between the chapels, the barrel vault is coffered, and the chapel arches are extremely plain. But here the likeness ends. The pilasters are panelled and have very simple moulded capitals; the entablature is quite ordinary, without triglyphs or mutules, and is broken round each pair of pilasters; the coffers on the vault are very deep, and are scarcely moulded; and, above all, the proportions are quite different as the nave is too wide for its height, and the drum is terribly needed to lift up the dome. In short, the architect seems to have copied the dispositions of Santo Anto and has done his best to spoil them, and yet he has at the same time succeeded in making the interior look large, though with an almost Herrera-like clumsiness.

The south front is even more like Santo Anto. As there, three doors take the place of the porch, and the only difference below is that each Doric pilaster is flanked by half pilasters. Above the entablature the front breaks out into a wild up-piling of various pediments, but even here the likeness to Santo Anto is preserved, in that a great curve comes down from the outer Ionic pilasters of the central part, to end, however, not in obelisks, but in a great volute: the small towers too are set much further back. Above, as below, the central part is divided into three. Of these the two outer, flanked by Ionic pilasters on pedestals, are finished off above with curved pediments broken to admit of obelisks. The part between these has a large window below, a huge coat of arms above, and rises high above the sides to a pediment so arranged that while the lower mouldings form an angle the upper form a curve on which stand two finials and a huge cross. (Fig. 95.)

[Sidenote: Oporto, Collegio Novo.]

Very soon this fantastic way of piling up pieces of pediment and of entablature became only too popular, being copied for instance in the Collegio Novo at Oporto, where, however, the design is not quite so bad as the towers are brought forward and are carried up considerably higher. But apart from this horrid misuse of cla.s.sic details the greatest fault of the facade at Coimbra is the disproportionate size of some of the details; the obelisks and the cherubs' heads on which they stand, the statues at the ends, and the central cross, and above all the colossal acanthus leaves in the great scrolls are of such a size as entirely to dwarf all the rest.

From what remains of the front of Santo Anto, it looks as if it and the front of the Se Velha had been very much alike. Santo Anto was not quite finished till 1652, so that it is probable that the upper part of the west front dates from the seventeenth century, long after Terzi's death, and that the Se Nova at Coimbra was finished about the same time, and perhaps copied from it.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Misericordia.]

But it was not only Terzi's churches which were copied at Coimbra. While the Se Nova, then, and for nearly two hundred years more, the church of the Jesuits, was still being built, the architect of the chief pateo of the Misericordia took Diogo de Torralva's cloister at Thomar as his model.

It was in the year 1590 that Cardinal Affonso de Castello Branco began to build the headquarters of the Misericordia of Coimbra, founded in 1500 as a simple confraternity. The various offices of the inst.i.tution, including a church, the halls whose ceilings have been already mentioned, and hospital dormitories--all now turned into an orphanage--are built round two courtyards, one only of which calls for special notice, for nearly everything else has been rebuilt or altered.

In this court or cloister, the plan of the Claustro dos Filippes has been followed in that there are three wide arches on each side, and between them--but not in the corners, and further apart than at Thomar--a pair of columns. In this case the s.p.a.ce occupied by one arch is scarcely wider than that occupied by the two fluted Doric columns and the square-headed openings between them. Another change is that the complete entablature with triglyphs and metopes is only found above the columns, for the arches rise too high to leave room for more than the cornice. (Fig. 96.)

The upper story is quite different, for it has only square-headed windows, though the line of the columns is carried up by slender and short Ionic columns; a sloping tile roof rests immediately on the upper cornice, above which rise small obelisks placed over the columns.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Episcopal Palace.]

At about the same time the Cardinal built a long loggia on the west side of the entrance court of his palace at Coimbra. The hill on which the palace is built being extremely

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 95.

Se NOVA, COIMBRA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 96

COIMBRA.

MISERICORDIA.]

steep, an immense retaining wall, some fifty or sixty feet high, bounds the courtyard on the west, and it is on the top of this wall that the loggia is built forming a covered way two stories in height and uniting the Manoelino palace on the north with some offices which bound the yard on the south. This covered way is formed by two rows of seven arches, each resting on Doric columns, with a bal.u.s.trading between the outer columns on the top of the great wall. The ceiling is of wood and forms the floor of the upper story, where the columns are Ionic and support a continuous architrave. The whole is quite simple and unadorned, but at the same time singularly picturesque, since the view through the arches, over the old cathedral and the steeply descending town, down to the convent of Santa Clara and the wooded hills beyond the Mondego, is most beautiful; besides, the courtyard itself is not without interest. In the centre stands a fountain, and on the south side a stair, carried on a flying half-arch, leads up to a small porch whose steep pointed roof rests on two walls, and on one small column.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Se Velha Sacristy.]