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Updated: June 16, 2025
The small cloister of Santa Barbara is the most pleasing of all those which João de Castilho was able to finish. In order not to hide the west front of the church its arches had to be kept very low. They are three-centred and almost flat, while the vault is even flatter, the bays being divided by a stone beam resting on beautifully carved brackets.
If the church shows that Marcos Pires was not a great architect, the cloister still more marks his inferiority to the Fernandes or to João de Castilho, though with its central fountain and its garden it is eminently picturesque. Part of it is now, and probably all once was, of two stories.
He had been buried not here, but in his new foundation of Belem, and his son João III. and João de Castilho himself were too much occupied in finishing Belem and in making great additions to Thomar to be able to do much to the Capellas Imperfeitas.
Nothing else seems to be known of Ayres though a head carved under the west window of the chapter-house is said to be his but in a country so long illiterate as Portugal, where unwritten stories have been handed down from quite distant times, it is possible that oral tradition may be as true as written records. Now it is known that João de Castilho was working at Alcobaça in 1519.
It will be seen later how poorly Diogo de Castilho at Coimbra finished off his window on the west front of Santa Cruz. Here the work was probably finished first, and it is curious that Diogo in copying his brother's design did not also copy the great canopy which overshadows the window and which, rising through the cornice to a great pinnacled niche, so successfully finishes the whole design.
Cruz at Batalha, also built by João de Castilho, Manoelino and renaissance details are used side by side with the happiest result. On each jamb are three round shafts and two bands of renaissance carving; of these the inner band is carried round the broken and curved head of the opening, while the outer runs high up to form a square framing.
Two stone carvers, Alvaro Rodrigues and Diogo de Arruda, were working there in 1512 and 1513, and the stalls were begun in July 1511, so that some progress must have been made by them. If then João de Castilho did the work he must have been born some time before 1490, as he could hardly have been entrusted with such a work when a boy of scarcely twenty.
Though this upper cloister adds much to the picturesqueness of the whole it is not very pleasing in itself, as the three-centred arches are often too wide and flat, and yet it is of great interest as showing how João de Castilho was in 1518 beginning to accept renaissance forms though still making them assume a Manoelino dress. But in the door of the little parish church of Sta.
These letters make it possible to understand how buildings in those days took such a long time to finish, and how João de Castilho though it was at least begun in 1545 was able to do so little to the Claustro dos Filippes in the following six years. The last letter also seems to show that some at least of the labour was forced.
But, that it was not only such details as doors and monuments that began to show the result of the coming of the Frenchmen is seen in the work of João de Castilho, after he first left Thomar for Belem.
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