But to the famed Church of Santa Cruz, all that remains intact of a vast Augustian monastery, the pilgrim’s steps first turn. It stands in an open place at the end of the Rua do Visconde da Luz, sunk several feet below the present level of the street, and the magnificent Manueline, or Portuguese renascence front is spoilt by a mean and hideous detached portico, in front of the real doorway, with its fine carved figures and capricious canopies. The lower part of the octagonal tower is much damaged, and the delicately carved decorations destroyed; but enough remains of the upper part to prove the magnificence with which King Manuel in the beginning of the sixteenth century rebuilt the sepulchre of the earliest kings. In this church, of which the interior, lined with pictorial blue tiles, is now reduced to eighteenth-century aridity, with the exception of the roof and chancel where the magnificent tombs with recumbent figures of Affonso Henriques and his son, King Sancho, shame the tastelessness of the later work, a dramatic scene was once enacted. Both these first kings of Portugal had worn the habit of St. Augustine, and were lay members of this monastery where their bones were laid. In order to establish his right to the patronage of the foundation, King Manuel, in 1510, rebuilt the church and monastery in the exuberant and gorgeous style associated with his reign; and when the time came to restore the bodies of the kings to the new sepulchres prepared for them, Manuel caused the mummified corpse of Affonso Henriques to be clad in royal robes and kingly crown, enthroned before the high altar of Santa Cruz, and there receive the homage of his subjects as if still alive. The pulpit of the church, the work of Jean de Rouen, though stripped now of its side pilasters and famous canopy, is one of the most splendid examples of early French renascence; but the richest treasure of the church is a splendid early triptych, in the mysterious style of the so-called Gran Vasco (who is a mythical painter), in which the early Flemings are imitated exactly by apparently Portuguese hands. This triptych, which should be compared with the “Fountain of Life” described in the chapter on Oporto, and also with the famous “St. Peter” at Vizeu, is signed “Vellascus,” and represents in its three panels the “Ecce Homo,” the “Calvary” and the “Pentecost,” with the exquisite finish and glowing colour of Van Eyck and Memling. The cloisters of the church are a beautiful specimen, as is much of the exterior of the church itself, of the peculiar Manueline renascence Gothic, of which I have so frequently spoken, the motives being the capricious intertwining of cordage and branches, spiral bossed mouldings, exuberant pinnacles, and pendent floreated ornaments on the interior lines of arches and vaultings. Of this style the Bussaco palace-hotel is a notable modern specimen, and in a later chapter I propose to treat in some detail the other examples inspected during my trip.