OTHER MOORISH BUILDINGS
The old palace at Cintra is perhaps the only complete building to the
north of the Tagus designed and carried out by Moorish workmen scarcely,
if at all, influenced by what the conquering Christians were doing round
them. Further south in the province of Alemtejo Moorish buildings are
more common, and there are many in which, though the design and plan as
well as most of the detail may be Western, yet there is something, the
whitewashed walls, the round conical pinnacles, or the flat roofs which
give them an Eastern look.
And this is natural. Alemtejo was conquered after the country north of
the Tagus had been for some time Christian, and no large immigration of
Christians ever came to take the place of the Moors, so that those few
who remained continued for long in their own Eastern ways of building
and of agriculture.
It is especially in and about the town of Evora that this is seen, and
that too although the cathedral built at the end of the twelfth century
is, except for a few unimportant details, a Western building.
[Sidenote: Alvito.]
But more completely Eastern than any one building at Evora is the castle
at Alvito, a small town some thirty or forty miles to the south-west.
The town stands at the end of a long low hill and looks south over an
endless plain across to Beja, one of the most extensive and, in its way,
beautiful views in the country.
At one end of the town on the slope of the hill stands the castle, and
not far off in one of the streets is the town hall whose tower is too
characteristic of the Alemtejo not to be noticed. The building is
whitewashed and perfectly plain, with ordinary square windows. An
outside stair leads to the upper story, and behind it rises the tower.
It, like the building, is absolutely plain with semicircular openings
near the top irregularly divided by a square pier. Close above these
openings is a simple cornice on which stand rather high and narrow
battlements; within them rises a short eight-sided spire, and at each
corner a short round turret capped by a conical roof. The whole from top
to bottom is plastered and whitewashed, and it is this glaring whiteness
more than anything else which gives to the whole so Eastern a look.
As to the castle, Haupt in his most interesting book, _Die Baukunst der
Renaissance in Portugal_, says that, though he had never seen it, yet
from descriptions of its plan he had come to the conclusion that it was
the castle which, according to Vasari, was built by Andrea da Sansovino
for Dom Joao II. Now it is well known that Sansovino was for nine years
in Portugal and did much work there, but none of it can now be found
except perhaps a beautiful Italian door in the palace at Cintra; Vasari
also states that he did some work in the heavy and native style which
the king liked. Is it possible that the castle of Alvito is one of his
works in this native style?
Vasari says that Sansovino built for Dom Joao a beautiful palace with
four towers, and that part of it was decorated by him with paintings,
and it was because Haupt believed that this castle was built round an
arcaded court--a regular Italian feature, but one quite unknown in
Portugal--that he thought it must be Sansovino's lost palace.
As a matter of fact the court is not arcaded--there is only a row of
rough plastered arches along one side; there are five and not four
towers; there is no trace now of any fine painted decoration inside;
and, in short, it is inconceivable that, even to please a king, an
architect of the Italian renaissance could ever have designed such a
building.
The plan of the castle is roughly square with a round tower at three of
the corners, and at the fourth or southern corner a much larger tower,
rounded in front and projecting further from the walls. The main front
is turned to the south-west, and on that side, as well as on the
south-eastern, are the habitable parts of the castle. Farm buildings run
along inside and outside the north-western, while the north-eastern side
is bounded only by a high wall.
Half-way along the main front is the entrance gate, a plain pointed arch
surmounted by two shields, that on the right charged with the royal
arms, and that on the left with those of the Barao d'Alvito, to whose
descendant, the Marques d'Alvito, the castle still belongs. There is
also an inscription stating that the castle, begun in 1494 by the orders
of Dom Joao II. and finished in the time of Dom Manoel, was built by Dom
Diogo Lobo, Barao d'Alvito.[97]
In the court a stair, carried on arches, goes up to the third floor
where are the chief rooms in the house. None of them, which open one
from the other or from a passage leading to the chapel in the
westernmost corner, are in any way remarkable except for their windows.
The ceilings of the principal rooms are of wood and panelled, but are
clearly of much later date than the building and are not to be compared
with those at Cintra. Most of the original windows--for those on the
main front have been replaced by plain square openings--are even more
Eastern than those at Cintra. They are nearly all of two lights--there
is one of a single light in the passage--but are without the square
framing. Each window has three very slender white marble shafts, with
capitals and with abaci moulded on each side. On some of the capitals
are carved twisted ropes, while others, as in a window in the large
southern tower, are like those at Cintra. As the shafts stand a little
way back from the face of the wall the arches are of two orders, of
which only the inner comes down to the central shaft. (Fig. 47.)
These arches, all horseshoe in shape, are built of red brick with very
wide mortar joints, and each brick, in both orders, is beautifully
moulded or cut at the ends so as to form a series of small trefoiled
cusps, each arch having as many as twenty-seven or more. The whole
building is plastered and washed yellow, so that the contrast between
the bare walls and the elaborate red arches and white shafts is
singularly pleasing. All the outer walls are fortified, but the space
between each embrasure is far longer than usual; the four corner towers
rise a good deal above the rest of the buildings, but in none, except
the southern, are there windows above the main roof. It has one, shaped
like the rest, but now all plastered and framed in an ogee moulding.
Half-way along the north-west wall, outside it, stands the keep, which
curiously is not Arab at all. It is a large square tower of no great
height, absolutely plain, and built of unplastered stone or marble. It
has scarcely any windows, and walls of great thickness which, like those
of the smaller round towers, have a slight batter. It seems to be older
than the rest, and now its chief ornament is a large fig-tree growing
near the top on the south side.[98]
[Sidenote: Evora.]
[Sidenote: Pacos Reaes.]
Of all the towns in the Alemtejo Evora is the one where Eastern
influence is most strongly marked. Indeed the Roman temple and the
cathedral are perhaps the only old buildings which seem to be distinctly
Western, and even the cathedral has some trace of the East in its two
western spires, one round and tiled, and the other eight-sided and
plastered. For long Evora was one of the chief towns of the kingdom, and
was one of those oftenest visited by the kings. Their palace stood close
to the church of Sao Francisco, and must once have been a beautiful
building.
Unfortunately most of it has disappeared, and what is left, a large hall
partly of the time of Dom Manoel, has been so horribly restored in order
to turn it into a museum as to have lost all character.
A porch still stands at the south end, but scraped and pointed out of
all beauty. It has in front four square stone piers bearing large
horseshoe brick arches, and these arches are moulded and cusped exactly
like those at Alvito.
[Sidenote: Morgado de Cordovis.]
There are no other examples of Moorish brickwork in the town, but there
is more than one marble window resembling those at Alvito in shape. Of
these the most charming are found in the garden of a house belonging to
a 'morgado' or entailed estate called Cordovis. These windows form two
sides of a small square summer-house; their shafts have capitals like
those of the dining-room windows at Cintra, and the horseshoe arches
are, as usual, cusped. A new feature, showing how the pure Arab details
were being gradually combined with Gothic, is an ogee moulding which,
uniting the two arches, ends in a large Gothic finial; other mouldings
run up the cornice at the angles, and the whole, crowned with
battlements, ends in a short round whitewashed spire.
Some miles from Evora among the mountains, Affonso of
[Illustration: FIG. 47.
CASTLE, ALVITO.
COURTYARD.]
[Illustration: FIG. 48.
EVORA.
CHAPTER HOUSE DOOR OF SAO JOAO, EVANGELISTA.]
[Sidenote: Sempre Noiva.]
Portugal, archbishop of Evora, built himself a small country house which
he called Sempre Noiva, or 'Ever New,' about the beginning of the
sixteenth century. It is now a ruin having lost all its woodwork, but
the walls are still well preserved. The plan is simple; a rectangle with
a chapel projecting from the eastern side, and a small wing from the
west end of the south side. All the ground floor is vaulted, as is the
chapel, but the main rooms on the first floor had wooden roofs, except
the one next the chapel which forms the middle floor of a three-storied
tower, which, rising above the rest of the building, has a battlemented
flat roof reached by a spiral stair. This stair, like the round
buttresses of the chapel, is capped by a high conical plastered roof. As
usual the whole, except the windows and the angles, is plastered and has
a sgraffito frieze running round under the cornice. There is a large
porch on the north side covering a stair leading to the upper floor,
where most of the windows are of two lights and very like those of the
pavilion at Evora. Two like them have the ogee moulding, and at the
sides a rounded moulding carried on corbels and finished above the
window with a carved finial. The capitals are again carved with leaves,
but the horseshoe arches have no cusps, and the mouldings, like the
capitals, are entirely Gothic; the union between the two styles, Gothic
and Arab, was already becoming closer.
Naturally Moorish details are more often found in secular than in
religious buildings: yet there are churches where such details exist
even if the general plan and design is Christian.
[Sidenote: Sao Joao Evangelista, Evora.]
Just to the north of the cathedral of Evora, Rodrigo Affonso de Mello,
count of Olivenca, in 1485 founded a monastery for the Loyos, or Canons
Secular of St. John the Evangelist. The church itself is in no way
notable; the large west door opening under a flat arched porch is one of
these with plain moulded arches and simple shafts which are so common
over all the country, and is only interesting for its late date. At the
left side is a small monument to the founder's memory; on a corbel
stands a short column bearing an inscribed slab, and above the slab is a
shield under a carved curtain. Inside are some tombs--two of them being
Flemish brasses--and great tile pictures covering the walls. These give
the life of Sao Lorenzo Giustiniani, patriarch of Venice, and canon of
San Giorgio in Alga, where the founder of the Loyos had been kindly
received and whence he drew the rules of his order, and are interesting
as being signed and dated 'Antonius ab oliva fecit 1711.'
The cloisters are also Gothic with vine-covered capitals, but the
entrance to the chapter-house and refectory is quite different. In
general design it is like the windows at Sempre Noiva, two horseshoe
arches springing from the capitals of thin marble shafts and an ogee
moulding above. The three shafts are twisted, the capitals are very
strange; they are round with several mouldings, some fluted, some carved
with leaves, some like pieces of rope: the moulded abaci also have four
curious corbels on two sides. The capitals are carried across the jambs
and the outer moulding, which is of granite, as is the whole except the
three shafts and their caps, and between the shafts and this moulding
there is a broad band of carved foliage. The ogee and the side finials
or pinnacles, which are of the same section as the outer moulding from
which they spring, are made of a bundle of small rolls held together by
a broad twisted ribbon. Lastly, between the arches and the ogee there is
a flat marble disk on which is carved a curious representation of a
stockaded enclosure, supposed to be memorial of the gallant attack made
by Affonso de Mello on Azila in Morocco.[99] The whole is a very curious
piece of work, the capitals and bases being, with the exception of some
details at Thomar and at Batalha, the most strange of the details of
that period, though, were the small corbels left out, they would differ
but little from other Manoelino capitals, while the bases may be only an
attempt of a Moorish workman to copy the interpenetration of late
Gothic. (Fig. 48.)
[Sidenote: Sao Francisco, Evora.]
Not much need be said here of the church of Sao Francisco or of the
chapel of Sao Braz, both begun at about the same time. Sao Francisco was
long in building, for it was begun by Affonso V. in 1460 and not
finished till 1501. It is a large church close to the ruins of the
palace at Evora, and has a wide nave without aisles, six chapels on each
side, larger transept chapels, and a chancel narrower than the nave. It
is, like most of Evora, built of granite, has a pointed barrel vault cut
into by small groins at the sides and scarcely any windows, for the
outer walls of the side chapels are carried up so as to leave a narrow
space between them and the nave wall. This was probably done to support
the main vault, but the result is that almost the only window is a
large one over the west porch. It is this porch that most strongly shows
the hand of Moorish workmen. It is five bays long and one deep, and most
of the five arches in front, separated by Gothic buttresses and
springing from late Gothic capitals, are horseshoe in shape. The white
marble doorway has two arches springing from a thin central shaft, which
like the arches and the two heavy mouldings, which forming the outer
part of the jambs are curved over them, is made of a number of small
rounds partly straight and partly twisted. At the corners of the church
are large round spiral pinnacles with a continuous row of battlements
between; these battlements interspersed with round pinnacles are even
set all along the ridge of the vault. The reredos and the stalls made by
Olivel of Ghent in 1508 are gone; so are Francisco Henriques' stained
windows, but there are still some good tiles, and in a large square
opening looking into the chancel there is a shaft with a beautiful early
renaissance capital.
[Sidenote: Sao Braz, Evora.]
Sao Braz stands outside the town near the railway station. It was built
as a pilgrimage chapel soon after 1482, when the saint had been invoked
to stay a terrible plague. It is not large, has an aisleless nave of
four bays, a large porch with three wide pointed arches at the west, and
a sort of domed chancel. Most of the details are indeed Gothic, but
there is little detail, and the whole is entirely Eastern in aspect. It
is all plastered, the buttresses are great rounded projections capped
with conical plastered roofs; there are battlements on the west gable
and on the three sides of the porch, which also has great round
conical-topped buttresses or turrets at the angles.
Inside there are still fine tiles, but the sgraffito frieze has nearly
disappeared from the outer cornice.
There is also an interesting church somewhat in the same style as Sao
Braz, but with aisles and brick flying buttresses at Vianna d'Alemtejo
near Alvito.