Portuguese Architecture Part 30

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF NOSSA SENHORA DO PILAR]

Now the eucalyptus-trees planted round the church have grown so tall that only the parapet can be seen rising above the tree-tops.

Though much of the detail of the outside is far from being cla.s.sical or correct, the whole is well proportioned and well put together, but the same cannot be said of the inside. Pilasters of inordinate height have been seen in some of the Lisbon churches, but compared with these which here stand in couples between the chapels they are short and well proportioned. These pilasters, which are quite seventeen diameters high, have for capitals coa.r.s.e copies of those in So Vicente de Fora in Lisbon. In So Vicente the cornice was carried on corbels crossing the frieze, and so was continuous and unbroken. Here all the lower mouldings of the cornice are carried round the corbels and the pilasters so that only the two upper are continuous, an arrangement which is anything but an improvement. Another unpleasing feature are the three niches which, with hideous painted figures, are placed one above the other between the pilasters. The chancel arch reaches up to the main cornice, but those of the door and chapel recesses are low enough to leave room for the windows. The dome is divided into panels of various shapes by broad flat ribs with coa.r.s.e mouldings. The chancel and choir beyond have barrel vaults divided into simple square panels.

The church then, though interesting from its plan, is--inside especially--remarkably unpleasing, though it is perhaps only fair to attribute a considerable part of this disagreeable effect to the state of decay into which it has fallen--a state which has only advanced far enough to be squalid and dirty without being in the least picturesque.

Far more pleasing than the church is the round cloister behind. In it the thirty-six Ionic columns are much better proportioned, and the capitals better carved; on the cornice stands an attic, rendered necessary by the barrel vault, heavy indeed, but not too heavy for the columns below. This attic is panelled, and on it stand obelisk-bearing pedestals, one above each column, and between them pediments of strapwork. (Fig. 98.)

Had this cloister been square it would have been in no way very remarkable, but its round shape as well as the fig-trees that now grow in the garth, and the many plants which sprout from joints in the cornice, make it one of the most picturesque buildings in the country.

The rest of the monastic buildings have been in ruins since the siege of 1832.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Santa Cruz Sacristy.]

The sacristy of Santa Cruz at Coimbra must have been begun before Nossa Senhora da Serra had been finished. Though so much later--for it is dated 1622--the architect of this sacristy has followed much more closely the good Italian forms introduced by Terzi. Like that of the Se Velha, the sacristy of Santa Cruz is a rectangular building, and measures about 52 feet long by 26 wide; each of the longer sides is divided into three bays by Doric pilasters which have good capitals, but are themselves cut up into many small panels. The cornice is partly carried on corbels as in the Serra church, but here the effect is much better. There are large semicircular windows, divided into three lights at each end, and

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 98.

OPORTO.

CLOISTER, NOSSA SENHORA DA SERRA DO PILAR.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 99.

COIMBRA.

SACRISTY OF STA. CRUZ.]

the barrel vault is covered with deep eight-sided coffers. One curious feature is the way the pilasters in the north-east corner are carried on corbels, so as to leave room for two doors, one of which leads into the chapter-house behind the chancel. (Fig. 99.)

[Sidenote: Lisbon, Santa Engracia.]

Twenty years later was begun the church of Santa Engracia in Lisbon. It was planned on a great scale; a vast dome in the centre surrounded by four equal apses, and by four square towers. It has never been finished, and now only rises to the level of the main cornice; but had the dome been built it would undoubtedly have been one of the very finest of the renaissance buildings in the country.

Like the Serra church it is, outside, two stories in height having Doric pilasters below--coupled at the angles of the towers--and Ionic above.

In the western apse, the pilasters are replaced by tall detached Doric columns, and the Ionic pilasters above by b.u.t.tresses which grow out of voluted curves. Large, simply moulded windows are placed between the upper pilasters, with smaller blank windows above them, while in the western apse arches with niches set between pediment-bearing pilasters lead into the church.

Here, in Santa Engracia, is a church designed in the simplest and most severe cla.s.sic form, and absolutely free of all the fantastic misuse of fragments of cla.s.sic detail which had by that time become so common, and which characterise such fronts as those of the Se Nova at Coimbra or the Collegio Novo at Oporto. The niches over the entrance arches are severe but well designed, as are the windows in the towers and all the mouldings. Perhaps the only fault of the detail is that the Doric pilasters and columns are too tall.

Now in its unfinished state the whole is heavy and clumsy, but at the same time imposing and stately from its great size; but it is scarcely fair to judge so unfinished a building, which would have been very different had its dome and four encompa.s.sing towers risen high above the surrounding apses and the red roofs of the houses which climb steeply up the hillside.

[Sidenote: Coimbra, Santa Clara.]

The new convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra was begun about the same time--in 1640--on the hillside overlooking the Mondego and the old church which the stream has almost buried; and, more fortunate than Santa Engracia, it has been finished, but unlike it is a building of little interest.

The church is a rectangle with huge Doric pilasters on either side supporting a heavy coffered roof. There are no aisles, but shallow altar recesses with square-headed windows above. The chancel at the south end is like the nave but narrower; the two-storied nuns' choir is to the north. As the convent is still occupied it cannot be visited, but contains the tomb of St. Isabel, brought from the old church, in the lower choir, and her silver shrine in the upper. Except for the cloister, which, designed after the manner of the Claustro dos Filippes at Thomar, has coupled Doric columns between the arches, and above, niches flanked by Ionic columns between square windows, the rest of the nunnery is even heavier and more barrack-like than the church. Indeed almost the only interest of the church is the use of the huge Doric pilasters, since from that time onward such pilasters, usually as clumsy and as large, are found in almost every church.

This fondness for Doric is probably due to the influence of Terzi, who seems to have preferred it to all the other orders, though he always gave his pilasters a beautiful and intricate capital. In any case from about 1580 onwards scarcely any other order on a large scale is used either inside or outside, and by 1640 it had grown to the ugly size used in Santa Clara and in nearly all later buildings, the only real exception being perhaps in the work of the German who designed Mafra and rebuilt the Capella Mor at Evora. Such pilasters are found forming piers in the church built about 1600 to be the cathedral of Leiria, in the west front of the cathedral of Portalegre, where they are piled above each other in three stories, huge and tall below, short and thinner above, and in endless churches all over the country. Later still they degenerated into mere angle strips, as in the cathedral of Angra do Heroismo in the Azores and elsewhere.

Such a building as Santa Engracia is the real ending of Architecture in Portugal, and its unfinished state is typical of the poverty which had overtaken the country during the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such buildings as she did herself finish--for it must not be forgotten that Mafra was designed by a foreigner--show a meanness of invention and design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a happier age.

CHAPTER XIX

THE RESTORATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When elected at Thomar in 1580, Philip II. of Spain had sworn to govern Portugal only through Portuguese ministers, a promise which he seems to have kept. He was fully alive to the importance of commanding the mouth of the Tagus and the splendid harbour of Lisbon, and had he fixed his capital there instead of at Madrid it is quite possible that the two countries might have remained united.

For sixty years the people endured the ever-growing oppression and misgovernment. The duque de Lerma, minister to Philip III., or II. of Portugal, and still more the Conde duque de Olivares under Philip IV., treated Portugal as if it were a conquered province.

In 1640, the very year in which Santa Engracia was begun, the regent was Margaret of Savoy, whose ministers, with hardly an exception, were Spaniards.

It will be remembered that when Philip II. was elected in 1580, Dona Catharina, d.u.c.h.ess of Braganza and daughter of Dom Manoel's sixth son, Duarte, duke of Guimares, had been the real heir to the throne of her uncle, the Cardinal King. Her Philip had bought off by a promise of the sovereignty of Brazil, a promise which he never kept, and now in 1640 her grandson Dom Joo, eighth duke of Braganza and direct descendant of Affonso, a b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of Dom Joo I., had succeeded to all her rights.

He was an unambitious and weak man, fond only of hunting and music, so Olivares had thought it safe to restore to him his ancestral lands; and to bind him still closer to Spain had given him a Spanish wife, Luisa Guzman, daughter of the duke of Medina Sidonia. Matters, however, turned out very differently from what he had expected. A gypsy had once told Dona Luisa that she would be a queen, and a queen she was determined to be. With difficulty she persuaded her husband to become the nominal head of the conspiracy for the expulsion of the Spaniards, and on the 1st of December 1640 the first blow was struck by the capture of the regent and her ministers in the palace at Lisbon. Next day, December 2nd, the duke of Braganza was saluted as King Dom Joo IV. at Villa Vicosa, his country home beyond Evora.

The moment of the revolution was well chosen, for Spain was at that time struggling with a revolt which had broken out in Cataluna, and so was unable to send any large force to crush Dom Joo. All the Indian and African colonies at once drove out the Spaniards, and in Brazil the Dutch garrisons which had been established there by Count Maurice of Na.s.sau were soon expelled.

Though a victory was soon gained over the Spaniards at Montijo, the war dragged on for twenty-eight years, and it was only some years after Don John of Austria[168] had been defeated at Almeixial by Schomberg (who afterwards took service under William of Orange) that peace was finally made in 1668. Portugal then ceded Ceuta, and Spain acknowledged the independence of the revolted kingdom, and granted to its sovereign the t.i.tle of Majesty.

It is no great wonder, then, that with such a long-continued war and an exhausted treasury a building like Santa Engracia should have remained unfinished, and it would have been well for the architecture of the country had this state of poverty continued, for then far more old buildings would have survived unaltered and unspoiled.

Unfortunately by the end of the seventeenth century trade had revived, and the discovery of diamonds and of gold in Brazil had again brought much wealth to the king.

Of the innumerable churches and palaces built during the eighteenth century scarcely any are worthy of mention, for perhaps the great convent palace of Mafra and the Capella Mor of the Se at Evora are the only exceptions.

In the early years of that century King Joo V. made a vow that if a son was born to him, he would, on the site of the poorest monastery in the country, build the largest and the richest. At the same time anxious to emulate the glories of the Escorial, he determined that his building should contain a palace as well as a monastery--indeed it may almost be said to contain two palaces, one for the king on the south, and one on the north for the queen.

[Sidenote: Mafra.]

A son was born, and the poorest monastery in the kingdom was found at Mafra, where a few Franciscans lived in some miserable buildings. Having found his site, King Joo had next to find an architect able to carry out his great scheme, and so low had native talent fallen, that the architect chosen was a foreigner, Frederic Ludovici or Ludwig, a German.

The first stone of the vast building was laid in 1717, and the church was dedicated thirteen years later, in 1730.[169]

The whole building may be divided into two main parts. One to the east, measuring some 560 feet by 350, and built round a large square courtyard, was devoted to the friars, and contained the convent entrance, the refectory, chapter-house, kitchen, and cells for two hundred and eighty brothers, as well as a vast library on the first floor.

The other and more extensive part to the west comprises the king's apartments on the south side, the queen's on the north, and between them the church.

It is not without interest to compare the plan of this palace or monastery with the more famous Escorial. Both cover almost exactly the same area,[170] but while in the Escorial the church is thrust back at the end of a vast patio, here it is brought forward to the very front.

There the royal palace occupies only a comparatively small area in the north-west corner of the site, and the monastic part the whole lying south of the entrance patio and of the church; here the monastic part is thrust back almost out of sight, and the palace stretches all along the west front except where it is interrupted in the middle by the church.

Indeed the two buildings differ from one another much as did the characters of their builders. The gloomy fanaticism of Philip of Spain is exemplified by the preponderance of the monastic buildings no less than by his own small dark bed-closet opening only to the church close to the high altar. Joo V., pleasure-loving and luxurious, pushed the friars to the back, and made his own and the queen's rooms the most prominent part of the whole building, and one cannot but feel that, though a monastery had to be built to fulfil a vow, the king was actuated not so much by religious zeal as by an ostentatious megalomania which led him to try and surpa.s.s the size of the Escorial.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF MAFRA]

To take the plan rather more in detail. The west front, about 740 feet long, is flanked by huge square projecting pavilions. The king's and the queen's apartments are each entered by rather low and insignificant doorways in the middle of the long straight blocks which join these pavilions to the church. These doors lead under the palace to large square courtyards, one on each side of the church, and forming on the ground floor a cloister with a well-designed arcading of round arches, separated by Roman Doric shafts. The king's and the queen's blocks are practically identical, except that in the king's a great oval hall called the Sala dos actos takes the place of some smaller rooms between the cloister and the outer wall.