The square tower is exceedingly plain, without string course or buttress
to mitigate its severity. Half-way up on the west side is a small window
with a battlemented balcony in front projecting out on three great
corbels; higher up are plain belfry windows. At the top, square
balconies or bartizans project diagonally from the corners; the whole,
though there are but three pyramidal battlements on each side, being
even more strongly fortified than the rest of the church. Now in the
fourteenth century such fortification of a church can hardly have been
necessary, and they were probably built rather to show that the church
belonged to a military order than with any idea of defence. The inside
is less interesting, the pointed arches are rather thin and the capitals
poor, the only thing much worthy of notice being the font, belonging to
the time of change from Gothic to Renaissance, and given in 1512.[71]
[Sidenote: Chancel, Sé, Lisbon.]
Of the other buildings of the time of Dom Affonso IV. who succeeded his
father Diniz in 1328 the most important
[Illustration: FIG. 30.
COIMBRA.
STA. CLARA.]
has been the choir of the cathedral at Lisbon; the church had been much
injured by an earthquake in 1344 and the whole east end was at once
rebuilt on the French plan, otherwise unexampled in Portugal except by
the twelfth-century choir at Alcobaça. Unfortunately the later and more
terrible earthquake of 1755 so ruined the whole building that of Dom
Affonso's work only the surrounding aisle and its chapels remain. The
only point which calls for notice is that the chapels are considerably
lower than the aisle so as to admit of a window between the chapel arch
and the aisle vault. All the chapels have good vaulting and simple
two-light windows, and capitals well carved with naturalistic foliage.
In one chapel, that of SS. Cosmo and Damião, screened off by a very good
early wrought-iron grill, are the tombs of Lopo Fernandes Pacheco and of
his second wife Maria Rodrigues. Dona Maria, lying on a stone
sarcophagus, which stands on four short columns, and whose sides are
adorned with four shields with the arms of her father, Ruy di Villa
Lobos, has her head protected by a carved canopy and holds up in her
hands an open book which, from her position, she could scarcely hope to
read.[72]
[Sidenote: Royal tombs, Alcobaça. (Fig. 31.)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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