BATALHA AND THE DELIVERANCE OF PORTUGAL
Towards the end of the fourteenth century came the most important and
critical years that Portugal had yet known. Dom Pedro, dying after a
reign of only ten years, was succeeded by his only legitimate son,
Fernando, in 1367. Unfortunately the new king at his sister's wedding
saw and fell in love with the wife of a northern nobleman, and soon
openly married this Dona Leonor Telles de Menezes, though he was himself
already betrothed to a Castilian princess, and though her own husband
was still alive. At the first court or Beja Manos held by Dona Leonor at
Leca near Oporto, all the Portuguese nobility except Dom Diniz, the
king's half-brother and a son of Inez de Castro, acknowledged her as
queen. But soon the evil influence she exercised over the king and the
stories of her cruelty made her extremely unpopular and even hated by
the whole nation. The memory of the vengeance she took on her own
sister, Dona Maria Telles, is preserved by an interesting old house in
Coimbra which has indeed been rebuilt since, in the early sixteenth
century, but is still called the House of the Telles. To the dislike
Queen Leonor felt for the sons of Inez de Castro, owing to Dom Diniz's
refusal to kiss her hand, was added the hatred she had borne her sister,
who was married to Dom Joao, another son of Dona Inez, ever since this
sister Dona Maria had warned her to have nothing to do with the king;
she was also jealous because Dona Maria had had a son while her own two
eldest children had died. So plotting to be rid of them both, she at
last persuaded Dom Joao that his wife was not faithful to him, and sent
him full of anger to that house at Coimbra where Dona Maria was living
and where, without even giving his wife time to speak, he stabbed her to
death. Soon after Dona Leonor came in and laughed at him for having
believed her lies so as to kill his own wife. Failing to kill the queen,
Dom Joao fled to Castile.
When Dom Fernando himself died in 1383 he left his widow as regent of
the kingdom on behalf of their only daughter, Dona Brites, whom they had
married to Don Juan I. of Castile. It was of course bad enough for the
nation to find itself under the regency of such a woman, but to be
absorbed by Castile and Leon was more than could be endured. So a great
Cortes was held at Coimbra, and Dom Joao, grand master of the Order of
Aviz, and the son of Dom Pedro and Dona Thereza Lourenco, was elected
king. The new king at once led his people against the invaders, and
after twice defeating them met them for the final struggle at
Aljubarrota, near Alcobaca, on 14th August 1385. The battle raged all
day till at last the Castilian king fled with all his army, leaving his
tent with its rich furniture and all his baggage. Before the enemy had
been driven from the little town of Aljubarrota, the wife of the village
baker made herself famous by killing nine Spaniards with her wooden
baking shovel--a shovel which may still be seen on the town arms. When
all was over Dom Joao dedicated the spoil he had taken in the Castilian
king's tent to Our Lady of the Olive Tree at Guimaraes where may still
be seen, with many other treasures, a large silver-gilt triptych of the
Nativity and one of the silver angels from off the royal altar.[75]
Besides this, he had promised if victorious to rebuild the church at
Guimaraes and to found where the victory had been won a monastery as a
thankoffering for his success.
[Sidenote: Batalha.]
This vow was fulfilled two years later in 1387 by building the great
convent of Sta. Maria da Victoria or Batalha, that is Battle, at a place
then called Pinhal[76] in a narrow valley some nine or ten miles north
of Aljubarrota and seven south of Leiria. Meanwhile John of Gaunt had
landed in Galicia with a large army to try and win Castile and Leon,
which he claimed for his wife Constance, elder daughter of Pedro the
Cruel; marching through Galicia he met Dom Joao at Oporto in February
1387, and then the Treaty of Windsor, which had been signed the year
before and which had declared the closest union of friendship and
alliance to exist between England and Portugal, was further strengthened
by the marriage of King Joao to Philippa, the daughter of John of Gaunt
and of his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster. Soon after, the peace of
the Peninsula was assured by the marriage of Catherine, the only child
of John of Gaunt and of Constance of Castile, to Enrique, Prince of the
Asturias and heir to the throne of Castile.
[Illustration: PLAN OF BATALHA]
But it is time now to turn from the history of the foundation of Batalha
to the buildings themselves, and surely no more puzzling building than
the church is to be found anywhere. The plan, indeed, of the church,
omitting the Capella do Fundador and the great Capellas Imperfeitas,
presents no difficulty as it is only a repetition of the already
well-known and national arrangement of nave with aisles, an aisleless
transept, with in this case five apsidal chapels to the east. Now in all
this there is nothing the least unusual or different from what might be
expected, except perhaps that the nave, of eight bays, is rather longer
than in any previous example. But the church was built to commemorate a
great national deliverance, and by a king who had just won immense booty
from his defeated enemy, and so was naturally built on a great and
imposing scale.[77]
The first architect, Affonso Domingues, perhaps a grandson of the
Domingo Domingues who built the cloister at Alcobaca, is said to have
been born at Lisbon and so, as might have been expected, his plan shows
no trace at all of foreign influence. And yet even this ordinary plan
has been compared by a German writer to that of the nave and transepts
of Canterbury Cathedral, a most unlikely model to be followed, as
Chillenden, who there carried out the transformation of Lanfranc's nave,
did not become prior till 1390, three years after Batalha had been
begun.[78] But though it is easy enough to show that the plan is not
English but quite national and Portuguese, it is not so easy to say what
the building itself is. Affonso Domingues died in 1402, and was
succeeded by a man whose name is spelt in a great variety of ways,
Ouguet, Huguet, or Huet, and to whom most of the building apart from the
plan must have been due. His name sounds more French than anything else,
but the building is not at all French except in a few details.
Altogether it is not at all easy to say whence those peculiarities of
tracery and detail which make Batalha so strange and unusual a building
were derived, except that there had been in Portugal nothing to lead up
to such tracery or to such elaboration of detail, or to the constructive
skill needed to build the high groined vaults of the nave or the
enormous span required to cover the chapter-house. Perhaps it may be
better to describe the church first outside and then in, and then see if
it is possible to discover from the details themselves whence they can
have come.
The five eastern apses, of which the largest in the centre is also twice
as high as the other four, are probably the oldest part of the building,
but all, except the two outer apses and the upper part of the central,
have been concealed by the Pateo built by Dom Manoel to unite the
church with the Capellas Imperfeitas, or unfinished chapels, beyond.
Here there is nothing very unusual: the smaller chapels all end in
three-sided apses, at whose angles are buttresses, remarkable only for
the great number of string courses, five in all, which divide them
horizontally; these buttresses are finished by two offsets just below a
plain corbel table which is now crowned by an elaborately pierced and
cusped parapet which may well have been added later. Each side of the
apse has one tall narrow single-light window which, filled at some later
date from top to bottom with elaborate stone tracery, has two thin
shafts at each side and a rather bluntly-pointed head. The central apse
has been much the same but with five sides, and two stories of similar
windows one above the other. So far there is nothing unexpected or what
could not easily have been developed from already existing buildings,
such as the church at Thomar or the Franciscan and Dominican churches no
further away than Pontevedra in Galicia.
Coming to the south transept, there is a large doorway below under a
crocketed gable flanked by a tall pinnacle on either side. This door
with its thirteenth-century mouldings is one of the most curious and
unexpected features of the whole building. Excepting that the capitals
are well carved with leaves, it is a close copy of the west door of Sao
Francisco at Santarem. Here the horseshoe cuspings are on the out-most
of the five orders of mouldings, and the chevron on the fourth, while
there is also a series of pointed cusps on the second. Only the
innermost betrays its really late origin by the curious crossing and
interpenetrating of the mouldings of its large trefoiled head. All this
is thoroughly Portuguese and clearly derived from what had gone before;
but the same cannot be said for the crockets or for the pinnacles with
their square and gabled spirelets. These crockets are of the common
vine-leaf shape such as was used in England and also in France early in
the fourteenth century, while the two-storied pinnacles with shallow
traceried panels on each face, and still more the square spirelets with
rather large crockets and a large bunchy finial, are not at all French,
but a not bad imitation of contemporary English work. On the gable above
the door are two square panels, each containing a coat-of-arms set in a
cusped quatrefoil, while the vine-leaves which fill in the surface
between the quatrefoils and the outer mouldings of the square, as also
those on the crowns which surmount the coats, are also quite English.
The elaborate many-sided canopies above are not so much so in form
though they might well have been evolved from English detail. Above the
gable comes another English feature, a very large three-light window
running up to the very vault; at the top the mullions of each light are
carried up so as to intersect, with cusped circles filling in each
space, while the whole window to the top is filled with a veil of small
reticulated tracery. Above the top of the large window there is a band
of reticulated panelling whose shafts run down till they reach the
crocketed hood-mould of the window: and above this an elaborately
pierced and foliated parapet between the square pinnacles of the angle
buttresses, which like these of the apses are remarkable for the
extraordinary number (ten) of offsets and string courses.
The next five bays of the nave as well as the whole north side (which
has no buttresses) above the cloister are all practically alike; the
buttresses, pinnacles and parapet are just the same as those of the
transept: the windows tall, standing pretty high above the ground, are
all of three lights with tracery evidently founded on that of the large
transept window, but set very far back in the wall with as many as three
shafts on each side, and with each light now filled in with horrid wood
or plaster work. The clerestory windows, also of three lights with
somewhat similar tracery, are separated by narrow buttresses bearing
square pinnacles, between which runs on a pointed corbel table the usual
pierced parapet, and by strong flying buttresses, which at least in the
western bays are doubly cusped, and are, between the arch and the
straight part, pierced with a large foliated circle and other tracery.
The last three bays on the south side are taken up by the Founder's
Chapel (Capella do Fundador), in which are buried King Joao, Queen
Philippa, and four of their sons. This chapel, which must have been
begun a good deal later than the church, as the church was finished in
1415 when the queen died and was temporarily buried before the high
altar, while the chapel was not yet ready when Dom Joao made his will in
1426, though it was so in 1434 when he and the queen were there buried,
is an exact square of about 80 feet externally, within which an octagon
of about 38 feet in diameter rises above the flat roof of the square,
rather higher than to the top of the aisles. Each exposed side of the
square is divided into three bays, one wider in the centre with one
narrower on each side. The buttresses, pinnacles and corbel table are
much the same as before, but the parapet is much more elaborate and more
like French flamboyant. Of the windows the smaller are of four lights
with very elaborate and unusual flowing tracery in their heads; small
parts of which, such as the tracery at the top of the smaller lights, is
curiously English, while the whole is neither English nor French nor
belonging to any other national school. The same may be said of the
larger eight-light window in the central bay, but that there the tracery
is even more elaborate and extravagant. The octagon above has buttresses
with ordinary pinnacles at each corner, a parapet like that below, and
flying buttresses, all pierced, cusped and crocketed like those at the
west front. On each face is a tall two-light window with flowing tracery
packed in rather tightly at the top.
As for the west front itself, which has actually been compared to that
of York Minster, the ends of the aisles are much like the sides, with
similar buttresses, pinnacles and parapet, but with the windows not set
back quite so far. On each side of the large central door are square
buttresses, running up to above the level of the aisle roof in six
stories, the four upper of which are panelled with what looks like
English decorated tracery, and ending in large square crocketed and
gabled pinnacles. The door itself between these buttresses is another
strange mixture. In general design and in size it is entirely French: on
either side six large statues stand on corbels and under elaborate
many-sided canopies, while on the arches themselves is the usual French
arrangement of different canopied figures: the tympanum is upheld by a
richly cusped segmental arch, and has on it a curiously archaistic
carving of Our Lord under a canopy surrounded by the four Evangelists.
Above, the crocketed drip-mould is carried up in an ogee leaving room
for the coronation of the Virgin over the apex of the arch. So far all
might be French, but on examining the detail, a great deal of it is
found to be not French but English: the half octagonal corbels with
their panelled and traceried sides, and still more the strips of
panelling on the jambs with their arched heads, are quite English and
might be found in almost any early perpendicular reredos or tomb, nor
are the larger canopies quite French. (Fig. 33.)
Above the finial of the ogee runs a corbel table supporting a pierced
and crested parapet, a little different in design from the rest.
Above this parapeted gallery is a large window lighting the upper part
of the nave, a window which for extravagance and exuberance of tracery
exceeds all others here or elsewhere. The lower part is evidently
founded on the larger windows of the Capella do Fundador. Like them it
has two larger pointed lights under a big ogee which reaches to the apex
of a pointed arch spanning the whole window, the space between this ogee
and the enclosing arch being filled in with more or less ordinary
flowing tracery. These two main lights are again much subdivided: at the
top is a circle with spiral tracery; below it an arch enclosing an ogee
exactly similar to the larger one above, springing from two sub-lights
which are again subdivided in exactly the same manner, into circle,
sub-arch, ogee and two small lights, so that the whole lower part of the
window is really built up from the one motive repeated three times. The
space between the large arch and the window head is taken up by a large
circle completely filled with minute spiral tracery and two vesicae also
filled in with smaller vesicae and circles. Now such a window could not
have been designed in England, in France, or anywhere else; not only is
it ill arranged, but it is entirely covered from top to bottom with
tracery, which shows that an attempt was being made to adapt forms
suitable in a northern climate to the brilliant summer sun of Portugal,
a sun which a native builder would rather try to keep out than to let
in. Above the window is a band of reticulated tracery like that below,
and the front is finished with a straight line of parapet pierced and
foliated like that below, joining the picturesque clusters of corner
pinnacles. The only other part of the church which calls for notice is
the bell-tower which stands at the north end of a very thick wall
separating the sacristy from the cloister; it is now an octagon
springing strangely from the square below, with a rich parapet, inside
which stands a tall spire; this spire, which has a sort of coronet
rather more than half-way up, consists of eight massive crocketed ribs
ending in a huge finial, and with the space between filled in with very
fine pierced work.[79] From such of the original detail which has
[Illustration: FIG. 33.
BATALHA.
WEST FRONT OF CHURCH.
_From a photograph by E. Biel & Co., Oporto._]
survived the beautiful alterations of Dom Manoel, the details of the
cloister must have been very like those of the church. The refectory to
the west of the cloister is a plain room roofed with a pointed
barrel-vault; but the chapter-house is constructively the most
remarkable part of the whole convent. It is a great room over sixty feet
square, opening off the east cloister walk by a large pointed door with
a two-light window each side. This great space is covered by an immense
vault, upheld by no central shaft; arches are thrown across the corners
bringing the square to an octagon, and though not very high, it is one
of the boldest Gothic vaults ever attempted; there is nowhere else a
room of such a size vaulted without supporting piers, and probably none
where the buttresses outside, with their small projection, look so
unequal to the work they have to do, yet this vault has successfully
withstood more than one earthquake.
The inside of the church is in singular contrast to the floridness of
the outside. The clustered piers are exceptionally large and tall; there
is no triforium, and the side windows are set so far back as to be
scarcely seen. The capitals have elaborate Gothic foliage, but are so
square as to look at a distance almost romanesque. In front of each pier
triple vaulting shafts run up, but instead of the side shafts carrying
the diagonal ribs as they should have done, all three carry bold
transverse arches, leaving the vaulting ribs to spring as best they can.
Each bay has horizontal ridge ribs, though their effect is lost by the
too great strength of the transverse arches. The chancel, a little lower
than the nave and transepts, is entered by an acutely pointed and richly
cusped arch, and has a regular Welsh groined vault, with a
well-developed ridge rib. Unfortunately almost all the church furniture
was destroyed during the French retreat, and of the stained glass only
that in the windows of the main apse survives, save in the three-light
window of the chapter-house, a window which can be exactly dated as it
displays the arms of Portugal and Castile quartered. This could only
have been done during the life of Dom Manoel's first wife, Isabel,
eldest daughter and heir of Ferdinand and Isabella. Dom Manoel married
her in 1497, and she died in 1498 leaving a son who, had he lived, would
have inherited the whole Peninsula and so saved Spain from the fatal
connection with the Netherlands inherited by Charles V. from his own
father. (Fig. 34.)
The most elaborate part of the interior is not unnaturally the Capella
do Fundador: though even there, the four beautiful carved and painted
altars and retables on the east side, and the elaborate carved presses
on the west, have all vanished from their places, burned for firewood by
the invaders in 1810. In the centre under the lantern, lie King Joao who
died in 1433, and on the right Queen Philippa of Lancaster who died
seventeen years before. The high tomb itself is a plain square block of
stone from which on each side there project four lions: at the head are
the royal arms surrounded by the Garter, and on the sides long
inscriptions in honour of the king and queen. The figures of the king
and queen lie side by side with very elaborate canopies at their heads.
King Joao is in armour, holding a sword in his left hand and with his
other clasping the queen's right hand. The figures are not nearly so
well carved as are those of Dom Pedro and Inez de Castro at Alcobaca,
nor is the tomb nearly as elaborate. On the south wall are the recessed
tombs of four of their younger sons. The eldest, Dom Duarte, intended to
be buried in the great unfinished chapel at the east, but still lies
with his wife before the high altar. Each recess has a pointed arch
richly moulded, and with broad bands of very unusual leaves, while above
it rises a tall ogee canopy, crocketed and ending in a large finial. The
space between arch and canopy and the sills of the windows is covered
with reticulated panelling like that on the west front, and the tombs
are divided by tall pinnacles. The four sons here buried are, beginning
at the west: first, Dom Pedro, duke of Coimbra; next him Dom Henrique,
duke of Vizeu and master of the Order of Christ, famous as Prince Henry
the Navigator; then Dom Joao, Constable of Portugal; and last, Dom
Fernando, master of the Order of Aviz, who died an unhappy captive in
Morocco. During the reign of his brother Dom Duarte he had taken part in
an expedition to that country, and being taken prisoner was offered his
freedom if the Portuguese would give up Ceuta, captured by King Joao in
the year in which Queen Philippa died. These terms he indignantly
refused and died after some years of misery. On the front of each tomb
is a large panel on which are two or three shields--one on that of Dom
Henrique being surrounded with the Garter--while all the surface is
covered with beautifully carved foliage. Dom Henrique alone has an
[Illustration: FIG. 34.
CHURCH, BATALHA.
INTERIOR.]
[Illustration: FIG. 35.
BATALHA.
CAPELLA DO FUNDADOR AND TOMB OF DOM JOAO I AND DONA FILIPPA.]
effigy, the others having only covers raised and panelled, while the
back of the Constable's monument has on it scenes from the Passion.
The eight piers of the lantern are made up of a great number of shafts
with a moulded angle between each. The capitals are covered with two
tiers of conventional vine-leaves and have octagonal, not as in the
church square abaci, while the arches are highly stilted and are
enriched with most elaborate cusping, each cusp ending in a square
vine-leaf. (Fig. 35.)
Such then are the main features of the church, the design of which,
according to most writers, was brought straight from England by the
English queen, an opinion which no one who knows English contemporary
buildings can hold for a moment.
First, to take the entirely native features. The plan is only an
elaboration of that of many already existing churches. The south
transept door is a copy of a door at Santarem. The heavy transverse
arches and the curious way the diagonal vaulting ribs are left to take
care of themselves have been seen no further away than at Alcobaca; the
flat-paved terraced roofs, whose origin the Visconde di Condeixa in his
monograph on the convent, sought even as far off as in Cyprus, existed
already at Evora and elsewhere.
Secondly, from France might have come the general design of the west
door, and the great height of the nave, though the proportion between
the aisle arcade and the clerestory, and the entire absence of any kind
of triforium, is not at all French.
Thirdly, several details, as has been seen, appear to be more English
than anything else, but they are none of them very important; the ridge
ribs in the nave, the Welsh groining of the chancel vault, the general
look of the pinnacles, a few pieces of stone panelling on buttresses or
door, a small part of a few of the windows, the moulding of the
chapter-house door, the leaves on the capitals of the Capella do
Fundador, and the shape of the vine-leaves at the ends of the cuspings
of the arches. From a distance the appearance of the church is certainly
more English than anything else, but that is due chiefly to the flat
roof--a thoroughly Portuguese feature--and to the upstanding pinnacles,
which suggest a long perpendicular building such as one of the college
chapels at Oxford.
Lastly, if the open-work spire is a real copy of that destroyed in
1755, and if there ever was another like it on the Capella do
Fundador,[80] they suggest German influence, although the earliest
Spanish examples of such German work were not begun at Burgos till 1442,
by which time the church here must have been nearly if not quite
finished.
It is then not difficult to assign a great many details, with perhaps a
certain amount of truth, to the influence of several foreign countries,
yet as a whole the church is unlike any building existing in any of
these countries or even in Spain, and it remains as difficult, or indeed
as impossible, to discover whence these characteristics came. So far
there had been scarcely any development of window tracery to lead up to
the elaborate and curious examples which are found here; still less had
any such constructive skill been shown in former buildings as to make so
great a vault as that of the chapter-house at all likely, for such a
vault is to be found perhaps nowhere else.
Probably the plan of the church, and perhaps the eastern chapel and
lower part of the transept, are the work of Affonso Domingues, and all
the peculiarities, the strange windows, the cusped arches, the
English-looking pinnacles, as well as all the constructive skill, are
due to Huguet his successor, who may perhaps have travelled in France
and England, and had come back to Portugal with increased knowledge of
how to build, but with a rather confused idea of the ornamental detail
he had seen abroad.
When Dom Joao died in 1433 his eldest son, Dom Duarte or Edward,
determined to build for himself a more splendid tomb-house than his
father's, and so was begun the great octagon to the east.
Unfortunately Dom Duarte's reign was short; he died in 1438, partly it
is said of distress at the ill success of his expedition to Morocco and
at the captivity there of his youngest brother, so that he had no time
to finish his chapel, and his son Affonso V., the African, was too much
engaged in campaigning against the Moors to be able to give either money
or attention to his father's work; and it was still quite unfinished
when Dom Manoel came to the throne in 1495, and though he did much
towards carrying on the work it was unfinished when he died in 1521 and
so remains to the present day. It is in designing this chapel that
Huguet showed his greatest originality and constructive daring: a few
feet behind the central apse he planned a great octagon about
seventy-two feet in diameter, surrounded by seven apsidal chapels, one
on each side except that next the church, while between these chapels
are small low chambers where were to be the tombs themselves. There is
nothing to show how this chapel was to be united to the church, as the
great doorway and vaulted hall were added by Dom Manoel some seventy
years later. When Dom Duarte died in 1438, or when Huguet himself died
not long after,[81] the work had only been carried out as far as the
tops of the surrounding chapels, and so remained all through his son's
and his grandson's reigns, although in his will the king had specially
asked that the building should be carried on. In all this original part
of the Capellas Imperfeitas there is little that differs from Huguet's
work in the church. The buttresses and corbel table are very similar
(the pinnacles and parapets have been added since 1834), and the apses
quite like those of the church. (Fig. 36.)
The tracery of the chief windows too is not unlike that of the lantern
windows of the founder's chapel except that there is a well-marked
transome half-way up--a feature which has been attributed to English
influence--while the single windows of the tomb chambers are completely
filled with geometric tracery. Inside, the capitals of the chapel arches
as well as their rich cuspings are very like those of the founder's
chapel; the capitals having octagonal abaci and stiff vine-leaves, and
the trefoiled cusps ending in square vine-leaves, while the arch
mouldings are, as in King Joao's chapel, more English than French in
section. There is nothing now to show how the great central octagon was
to be roofed--for the eight great piers which now rise high above the
chapel were not built till the time of Dom Manoel--but it seems likely
that the vault was meant to be low, and not to rise much above the
chapel roofs, finishing, as everywhere else in the church, in a flat,
paved terrace.
The only important addition made during the reigns of Dom Affonso V. and
of Dom Joao II. was that of a second cloister, north of the Claustro
Real, and still called the Cloister of Affonso. This cloister is as
plain and wanting in ornament as everything else about the monastery is
rich and elaborate, and it was probably built under the direction of
Fernao d'Evora, who succeeded his uncle Martim Vasques as master of the
works before 1448, and held that position for nearly thirty years.
Unlike the great cloister, whose large openings must, from the first,
have been meant for tracery, the cloister of Affonso V. is so very plain
and simple, that if its date were not known it would readily be
attributed to a period older even than the foundation of the monastery.
On each side are seven square bays separated by perfectly plain
buttresses, each bay consisting of two very plain pointed arches resting
on the moulded capitals of coupled shafts. Except for the buttresses and
the vault the cloister differs in no marked way from those at Guimaraes
and elsewhere whose continuous pointed arcades show so little advance
from the usual romanesque manner of cloister-building. Above is a second
story of later date, in which the tiled roof rests on short columns
placed rather far apart, and with no regard to the spacing of the bays
below. Round this are the kitchens and various domestic offices of the
convent, and behind it lay another cloister, now utterly gone, having
been burned by the French in 1810. Such are the church and monastery of
Batalha as planned by Dom Joao and added to by his son and grandson, and
though it is not possible to say whence Huguet drew his inspiration, it
remains, with all the peculiarities of tracery and detail which make it
seem strange and ungrammatical--if one may so speak--to eyes accustomed
to northern Gothic, one of the most remarkable examples of original
planning and daring construction to be found anywhere. Of the later
additions which give character to the cloister and to the Capellas
Imperfeitas nothing can be said till the time of Dom Manoel is reached.
[Illustration: FIG. 36.
BATALHA.
CAPELLAS IMPERFEITAS.
_From a photograph by E. Biel & Co., Oporto._]