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Updated: June 16, 2025
So after building two beautiful but incongruous arches, João de Castilho went back to his work elsewhere, and the chapels remain Imperfeitas to this day.
There can be little doubt that the transept front of the church of the Conceição Velha was also designed by João de Castilho. The church was built after 1520 on the site of a synagogue, and was almost entirely destroyed by the earthquake of 1755. Only the transept front has survived, robbed of its cornice and cresting, and now framed in plain pilasters and crowned by a pediment.
Though so much more interested in his monastery at Thomar, Dom João ordered João de Castilho to go on with the chapels, and in 1533 the loggia over the great entrance door had been finished. Beautiful though it is it did not please the king, and is not in harmony with the older work, and so nothing more was done.
Marcos Pires died in 1524 and was succeeded by Diogo de Castilho, and in a letter dated from Evora in that year the king orders a hundred gold cruzados to be paid to Diogo and to Master Nicolas for the statues on the west door which were still wanting, and two years later in September another letter granted Diogo the privilege of riding on a mule.
The barrel vault here and in the dormitory chapel in the convent are Italian features, but they have not been treated exactly as was done there, or as was to be done in Portugal some fifty years later, so that it seems more likely that João de Castilho got his knowledge of Italian work at second-hand, perhaps from one of the men sent there by Dom Manoel, and not by having been there himself.
He died shortly before 1553, as we learn from a document dated January 1st of that year, which states that his daughter Maria de Castilho then began, on the death of her father, to receive a pension of 20,000 reis. The new Coro is about eighty-five feet long inside by thirty wide, and is of three bays.
If João de Castilho and his brother Diogo were really natives of one of the Basque provinces, they might rightly be included among the foreign artists who played such an important part in Portugal towards the end of Dom Manoel's reign and the beginning of that of his son, Dom João III. Yet the earlier work of João de Castilho at Thomar shows little trace of that renaissance influence which the foreigners, and especially the Frenchmen, were to do so much to introduce.
Although it was decided to build in 1492, little or nothing can have been done for long, if it is true that João de Castilho who did the work was only born about the year 1490; and that he did it is certain, as he says himself that he 'built the Coro, the chapter-house under the Coro the great arch of the church, and the principal door.
Inside renaissance detail is more in evidence, but since the great piers would not be carved till after they were built, it is more likely that the renaissance work there is due to João de Castilho himself and to what he had learned either from Nicolas or from the growing influence of the Coimbra School.
It is also more pleasing than any other contemporary building in Portugal, and the detail, though very rich, is more restrained. This may be due to the nationality of João de Castilho, for some of the work is almost Spanish, for example the buttresses, the pinnacles, and the door with its trefoiled drip-mould.
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