Portuguese Architecture Part 6

The most unusual feature of the whole cathedral is the fine octagonal lantern at the crossing. Each face has a two-light window, pointed outside, with a round-headed arch within, leaving a pa.s.sage between the two walls. At each angle are plain b.u.t.tresses, weathered back a few feet below the corbel table, above which stand eight octagonal pinnacles each with eight smaller pinnacles surrounding a conical stone spire. The whole lantern is covered by a steep stone roof which, pa.s.sing imperceptibly from the octagonal to the round, is covered, as are all the other pinnacles, with scales carved in imitation of tiles. Inside the well-moulded vaulting ribs do not rise higher than the windows, leaving therefore a large s.p.a.ce between the vault and the outer stone capping. (Fig. 21.)

Lanterns, especially octagonal lanterns, are particularly common in Spain, and at Salamanca and its neighbourhood were very early developed and attained to a remarkable degree of perfection before the end of the twelfth century. It is strange, therefore, that they should be so rare in Portugal where there seem now to be only three: one, square, at Coimbra, an octagonal at Lisbon, and one here, where however there is nothing of the internal dome which is so striking at Salamanca. Probably this lantern was one of the enrichments added to the church by Bishop Durando who died in 1283, for the capitals of the west door look considerably later.

This door is built entirely of white marble with shafts which look, as do those of the south transept door, almost like Cipollino, taken perhaps from some Roman building. It has well-moulded arches and abaci; capitals richly carved with realistic foliage, and on each side six of the apostles, all very like each other, large-headed, long-bearded, and long-haired, with rather good drapery but bodies and legs which look far too short. St. Peter alone, with short curly hair and beard, has any individuality, but is even less prepossessing than his companions. They are, however, among the earliest specimens of large figure sculpture which survive, and by their want of grace make it easier to understand why Dom Manoel employed so many foreign artists in the early years of the sixteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 20.

EVORA.

Se. INTERIOR.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 21.

EVORA.

Se. FROM CLOISTERS.

SHEWING CENTRAL LANTERN.]

The large cloister to the south must once have been one of the best in the country. Here the main arches alone survive, having lost whatever subsidiary arches or tracery they may once have contained, but higher up under the corbel table are large open circles, not as everywhere else enclosed under the large arch, but quite independent of it. Many of these circles are still filled with thin slabs of granite all pierced with most beautiful patterns, some quite Gothic, but the majority almost Moorish in design, not unlike the slabs in the circles over the cloister arcades at Alcobaca, but though this is probably only a coincidence, still more like those at Tarragona in Cataluna. (Fig. 22.)

[Sidenote: Templar Church, Thomar.]

Like the cathedral at Evora, some of the arches in the Templar Church at Thomar are pointed, yet like it again, it is entirely romanesque both in construction and in detail.

The Knights Templars were already established in Portugal in 1126. With their headquarters at Soure, a little to the south of Coimbra, they had been foremost in helping Affonso Henriques in his attacks on the Moors, and when Santerem was taken in 1147 they were given the ecclesiastical superiority of the town. This led to a quarrel with Dom Gilberto, the English bishop of Lisbon, which was settled in 1150, when Dom Gualdim Paes, the most famous member the order ever produced in Portugal, was chosen to be Grand Master. He at once gave up all Santarem to the bishop, except the church of So Thiago, and received instead the territory of Ceras some forty or fifty miles to the north-east. There on the banks of the river Nabo, on a site famous for the martyrdom under Roman rule of Sant' Iria or Irene, Dom Gualdim built a church, and began a castle which was soon abandoned for a far stronger position on a steep hill some few hundred yards to the west across the river. This second castle, begun in 1160, still survives in part but in a very ruinous condition; the walls and the keep alike have lost their battlements and their original openings, though a little further west, and once forming part of the fortified enclosure, the church, begun in 1162, still remains as a high tower-like bastion crowned with battlements. Dom Gualdim had the laudable habit of carving inscriptions telling of any striking event, so that we may still read, not only how the castle was founded, but how 'In the year of the Era of Caesar, 1228 (that is 1190 A.D., on the 3rd of July), came the King of Morocco, leading four hundred thousand hors.e.m.e.n and five hundred thousand foot and besieged this castle for six days, destroying everything he found outside the walls. G.o.d delivered from his hands the castle, the aforesaid Master and his brethren. The same king returned to his country with innumerable loss of men and of animals.'[49] Doubtless the size of Yakub the Almohade leader's army is here much exaggerated, but that he was forced to retire from Thomar, and by pestilence from Santarem is certain, and though he made a more successful invasion two years later the Moors never again gained a footing to the north of the Tagus.

Dom Gualdim's church, since then enlarged by the addition of a nave to the west, was originally a polygon of sixteen sides with a circular barrel-vaulted aisle surrounding a small octagon, which with its two stories of slightly pointed arches contains the high altar.[50] (Fig.

23.)

The round-headed windows come up high, and till it was so richly adorned by Dom Manoel during his grand mastership of the Order of Christ more than three hundred years later, the church must have been extremely simple. Outside the most noticeable feature is the picturesque grouping of the bell-towers and gable, added probably in the seventeenth century, which now rise on the eastern side of the polygon, and which, seen above the orange and medlar trees of a garden reaching eastwards towards the castle, forms one of the most pleasing views in the whole country.

[Sidenote: So Joo de Alporo, Santarem.]

If Evora and the Templar church at Thomar show one form of transition, where the arches are pointed, but the construction and detail is romanseque, So Joo de Alporo at Santarem shows another, where the construction is Gothic but the arches are still all round.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 22.

EVORA.

Se. CLOISTER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 23.

THOMAR.

TEMPLARS' CHURCH.]

This church is said to stand on the site of a mosque and to have been at first called Al Koran, since corrupted into Alporo, but the present building can hardly have been begun till the early years of the thirteenth century. The church consists of an aisleless nave with good groined vaulting and a five-sided apsidal chancel. The round-arched west door stands under a pointed gable, but seems to have lost by decay and consequent restoration whatever ornament its rather flat mouldings may once have had. Above is a good wheel window, with a cusped circle in the centre, surrounded by eight radiating two-arched lights separated by eight radiating columns. The two arches of each light spring from a detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each corbel is something like the bows of a boat.[51]

The inside, now turned into a museum, is much more interesting. The chancel is entered, under a circular cusped window, by a wide round arch, whose outer moulding is curiously carried by shafts with capitals set across the angle as if to carry a vaulting rib; in the chancel itself the walls are double, the outer having the plain square-headed windows seen outside, and the inner very elegant two-light round-headed openings resting on very thin and delicate shafts, with a doubly cusped circle above. The vault, whose wall arches are stilted and slightly pointed, has strong well-moulded ribs springing from the well-wrought capitals of tall angle shafts. It will be seen that this is a very great advance on any older vaulting, since previously, except in the French Church at Alcobaca, groined vaults had only been attempted over square s.p.a.ces. The finest of the many objects preserved in the museum is the tomb of Dom Duarte de Menezes, who was killed in Africa in 1464 and buried in the church of So Francisco, whence, So Francisco having become a cavalry stable, it was brought here not many years ago. (Fig.

24.)

Such are, except for the church at Idanha a Velha and that of Castro de Avelans near Braganza, nearly all the early buildings in the country.

Castro de Avelans is interesting and unique as having on the outside brick arcades, like those on the many Mozarabic churches at Toledo, a form of decoration not found elsewhere in Portugal. The church of Alcobaca is of course, in part, a good deal older than are some of those mentioned above; but the whole, the romanesque choir as well as the early pointed nave, is so unlike anything that has come before or anything that has come after, that it seemed better to take it by itself without regard to strict chronological order.

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 24.

SANTAREM.

APSE, SO JOO DE ALPORO.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 25.

TRANSEPT.

ALCOBAcA.]

[Sidenote: Alcobaca.]

The first stone was laid in 1158, but the church was barely finished when King Sancho I. died in 1211 and was not dedicated till 1220, while the monastic buildings were not ready till 1223, when the monks migrated from Sta. Maria a Velha, their temporary home. The abbey was immensely wealthy: it had complete jurisdiction over fourteen villages whose inhabitants were in fact its serfs: it or its abbot was visitor to all Benedictine abbeys in the country and was, for over three hundred years, till the reign of Cardinal King Henry, the superior of the great military Order of Christ. It early became one of the first centres of learning in Portugal, having begun to teach in 1269. It helped Dom Diniz to found the University of Lisbon, now finally settled at Coimbra, with presents of books and of money, and it only acknowledged the king in so far as to give him a pair of boots or shoes when he chanced to come to Alcobaca. All these possessions and privileges of the monks were confirmed by Dom Joo IV. (1640-56) after the supremacy of the Spaniards had come to an end, and were still theirs when Beckford paid them his memorable visit near the end of the eighteenth century and was so splendidly entertained with feastings and even with plays and operas performed by some of the younger brothers. Much harm was of course done by the French invasion, and at last in 1834 the brothers were turned out, their house made into barracks, and their church and cloister left to fall into decay--a decay from which they are only being slowly rescued at the present time.

The first abbot, Ranulph, was sent by St. Bernard of Clairvaux himself at the king's special request, and he must have brought with him the plan of the abbey or at least of the church. Nearly all Cistercian churches, which have not been altered, are of two types which resemble each other in being very simple, having no towers and very little ornament of any kind. In the simpler of these forms, the one which prevailed in England, the transept is aisleless, with five or more chapels, usually square, to the east, of which the largest, in the centre, contains the main altar. Such are Fontenay near Monbart and Furness in Lancashire, and even Melrose, though there the church has been rebuilt more or less on the old plan but with a wealth of detail and size of window quite foreign to the original rule. In the other, a more complex type, the transept may have a western aisle, and instead of a plain square chancel there is an apse with surrounding aisle and beyond it a series of four-sided chapels. Pontigny, famous for the shelter it gave to Thomas-a-Becket, and begun in 1114, is of this type, and so was Clairvaux itself, begun in 1115 and rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Now this is the type followed by Alcobaca, and it is worthy of notice that, as far as the plan of choir and transept goes, Alcobaca and Clairvaux are practically identical. Pontigny has a choir of three bays between the transept and the apse and seven encircling chapels; Clairvaux had, and Alcobaca still has, a choir of but one bay and nine instead of seven chapels. Both had long naves, Clairvaux of eleven and Alcobaca of thirteen bays, but at the west end there is a change, due probably to the length of time which pa.s.sed before it was reached, for there is no trace of the large porch or narthex found in most early Cistercian churches.

The church is by far the largest in Portugal. It is altogether about 365 feet long, the nave alone being about 250 feet by 75, while the transept measures about 155 feet from north to south. Except in the choir all the aisles are of the same height, about 68 feet.

The east end is naturally the oldest part and most closely resembled its French original; the eight round columns of the apse have good plain capitals like those found in so many early Cistercian churches, even in Italy;[52] the round-headed clerestory windows are high and narrow, and there are well-developed flying b.u.t.tresses. Unfortunately all else has been changed: in the apse itself everything up to the clerestory level has been hidden by two rows of cla.s.sic columns and a huge reredos, and all the choir chapels have been filled with rococo woodwork and gilding, the work of an Englishman, William Elsden, who was employed to beautify the church in 1770.[53] Why except for the choir aisle, and the chapels in choir and transept, the whole church should be of the same height, it is difficult to say, for such a method of building was unknown in France and equally unknown in Spain or Portugal. Possibly by the time the nave was reached the Frenchmen who had planned the church were dead, and the native workmen, being quite unused to such a method of construction, for all the older vaulted churches have their central barrel upheld by the half-barrel vault of the galleries, could think of no other way of supporting the groining of the main aisle. They had of course the flying b.u.t.tresses of the choir apse to guide them, but there the points of support come so much closer together, and the weight to be upheld is consequently so much less than could be the case in the nave, that they may well have thought that to copy them was too dangerous an experiment as well as being too foreign to their traditional manner of construction.[54] Whatever may be the reason, the west aisle of the transept and the side aisles of the nave rise to the full height of the building. Their arches are naturally very much stilted, and with the main vault rest on piers of quite unusual size and strength. The transverse arches are so large as almost to hide the diagonal ribs and to give the impression that the nave has, after all, a pointed barrel vault. The piers are throughout cross-shaped with a half-shaft on each cardinal face: at the crossing there is also a shaft in the angle, but elsewhere this shaft is replaced by a kind of corbel capital[55] at the very top which carries the diagonal ribs--another proof, as is the size of the transverse arches, that such a ribbed vault was still a half-understood novelty. The most peculiar point about nave piers is the way in which not only the front vaulting shafts but even that portion of the piers to which they are attached is, except in the two western bays, cut off at varying heights from the ground. In the six eastern bays, where the corbels are all at the same level, this was done to leave room for the monks' stalls,[56] but it is difficult to see why, in the case of the following five piers, against which, as at Clairvaux, stood the stalls of the lay brothers, the level of the corbels should vary so much. Now all stalls are gone and the church is very bare and desolate, with nothing but the horrible reredos to detract from that severity and sternness which was what St. Bernard wished to see in all churches of the Order. (Fig. 25.)

The small chapel to the west of the south transept is the only part of the church, except the later sixteenth-century sacristy, where there is any richness of detail, and there it is confined to the tombs of some of the earlier kings and queens, and especially to those of D. Pedro and the unfortunate Inez de Castro which belongs of course to a much later date.

The windows which are high up the aisle walls are large, round-headed, and perfectly plain. At the transept ends are large round windows filled with plain uncusped circles, and there is another over the west door filled with a rococo attempt at Gothic tracery, which agrees well with the two domed western towers whose details are not even good rococo.

Between these towers still opens the huge west door, a very plainly moulded pointed arch of seven orders, resting on the simple capitals of sixteen shafts: a form of door which became very common throughout the fourteenth century. The great cloister was rebuilt later in the time of Dom Diniz, leaving only the chapter-house entrance, which seems even older than the nave. As usual there is one door in the centre, with a large two-light opening on each side: all the arches are round and well moulded, and the capitals simply carved with stiff foliage showing a gradual transition from the earlier romanesque. In the monastery itself, now a barrack, there are still a few vaulted pa.s.sages which must belong to the original building, but nearly all else has been rebuilt, the main cloister in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and the greater part of the domestic buildings in the eighteenth, so that except for the cloister and sacristy, which will be spoken of later on, there is little worthy of attention.[57]

Now none of these buildings may show any very great originality or differ to any marked degree from contemporary buildings in Spain or even in the south of France, yet to a great extent they fixed a type which in many ways was followed down to the end of the Gothic period. The plan of Braga, Pombeiro, Evora or Coimbra is reproduced with but little change at Guarda, and if the western towers be omitted, at Batalha, some two hundred years later, and the flat paved roofs of Evora occur again at Batalha and at Guarda. The barrel-vaulted nave also long survived, being found as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century in the church of Santa Clara at Coimbra, and even about seventy years later in the church of the Knights of So Thiago at Palmella.

The battlements also of the castle at Guimares are found not only at Coimbra, but as late as 1336 in the church of Leca do Balio near Oporto, and, modified in shape by the renaissance even in the sixteenth-century churches of Villa do Conde and of Azurara.

Although the distinctively French features of Alcobaca seem to have had but little influence on the further development of building in Portugal, a few peculiarities are found there which are repeated again. For example, the unusually large transverse arches of the nave occur at Batalha, and the large plain western door is clearly related to such later doors as those at Leca do Balio or of So Francisco at Oporto.

Again the vaulting of the apse in So Joo de Alporo is arranged very much in the way which was almost universal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the chancels and side chapels of many a church, such as Santa Maria do Olival at Thomar, or the Graca at Santarem itself, and the curious boat-like corbels of So Joo are found more than once, as in the choir of the old church, formerly the cathedral of Silves, far south in the Algarve. The large round windows at Evora do not seem to be related to the window at So Joo, but to be of some independent origin; probably, like the similar windows at Leca and at Oporto, they too belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.

CHAPTER III