The likeness to Batalha is best seen in the Capella Mor. As the apse has
only three instead of five sides, the windows are rather wider, and
there are none below, but otherwise the resemblance is as great as may
be, when the model is of fine limestone and the copy of granite. The
buttresses have offset string courses, and square crocketed pinnacles
just as at Batalha; there has even been an attempt to copy the parapet,
though only the trefoil corbel table is really like the model, for the
parapet itself is solid with a cresting of rather clumsy fleurs-de-lis.
These pinnacles and this crested parapet are found everywhere all round
the church, though the pinnacles on the aisle walls from which the plain
flying buttresses spring are quite different, being of a Manoelino
design. Again the north transept door has evidently been inspired by the
richness of Batalha. Here the door itself is plain, but well moulded,
with above it an elaborately crocketed ogee drip-mould, which ends in a
large finial; above this rises to a considerable height some arcaded
panelling, ending at the top in a straight band of quatrefoil, and
interrupted by a steep gable. (Fig. 38.)
No other part of the outside calls for much notice except the boat-keel
corbels of the smaller apses, the straight gable-less ends to transept
and nave which show that the roofs are flat and paved, and the western
towers. These are of three stories. The lowest is square at the bottom
and octagonal above, the change being effected by a curved offset at two
corners, while at the third or western corner the curve has been cut
down so as to leave room for an eighteenth-century window, lighting the
small polygonal chapel inside, a chapel originally lit by two narrow
round-headed windows on the diagonal sides. In the second story there
are again windows on the same diagonal sides, but they have been built
up: while on the third or highest division--where the octagon is
complete on all sides--are four belfry windows. The whole is finished by
a crested parapet. The west front between these towers is very plain. At
the top a cresting, simpler than that elsewhere, below a round window
without tracery, lower still two picturesque square rococo windows, and
at the bottom a rather elaborate Manoelino doorway, built not many
years ago to replace one of the same date as the windows above.
Throughout the clerestory windows are not large. They are round-headed
of two lights, with simple tracery, and deep splays both inside and out.
The large transept windows with half octagonal heads under a large
trefoil were inserted about the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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