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God of God of God of Gods!" he groaned in a voice of agony that terrified Rosario. "Holy Christ of the Grao!" He staggered a few steps across the room, like a drunken man, and threw himself flat on the floor with a crash that shook the rickety building. He rolled over, and his legs seemed to bound from the violence of the fall.
But one by one the boats rounded the Breakwater, cheered by the crowd, and greeted by sobs and cries of joy from the families of the crews who ran off toward the Grao to meet their men. Soon so many of them were in that the throng of the Breakwater was noticeably smaller. The harbor entrance had turned to a veritable hell of wind and wave and whirlpool.
Raczynski, in his letters to the Berlin Academy, says that he had found Grão Vasco's birth in a register of Vizeu; but Vasco is not an uncommon name, and besides this child, Vasco Fernandes, was born in 1552 far too late to have painted any of the so-called Grão Vasco's pictures.
Courage, lads!" The Cristo del Grao had special charge of them and nothing bad could happen to the ship... Some of the seamen were silent, while others said this and that about the image without arousing the indignation of the old devotee. God, who sends dangers to the men of the sea, knows that their bad words lack malice. His religiosity extended to the very deeps.
He was looking before him as though he could see, as if he had a fixed destination, without hesitating a moment, yet going further out to sea when he imagined that he was heading toward the coast. "Padre San Vicente!" he moaned. "Cristo del Grao!..." In vain the captain shouted.
Then he waved on high his palm-leaf hat. "Viva el Santo Cristo del Grao!..." Other projectiles were falling around the Mare Nostrum, spattering it with jets of foam. Suddenly it trembled from poop to prow. Its plates trembled with the vibration of an explosion. "That's nothing!" yelled the captain, bending himself double over the bridge in order to see better the hull of his ship.
During the seventeenth century all memory of these painters had vanished. Looking at their work, the writers of that date were struck by what seemed to them, in their natural ignorance of Flemish art, a strange and peculiar style, and so attributed them all to a certain half-mythical painter of Vizeu called Vasco, or Grão Vasco, who is first mentioned in 1630.
Of course 'Velascus' is not Grão Vasco, though the name is the same, nor can he be Christovão de Figueredo, but perhaps the painting spoken of by Gregorio Lourenço as done by Christovão may only have been of the framing and not necessarily of the panels. These are gone, but there are still left the royal tombs, the choir stalls, the pulpit, and three beautiful carved altar-pieces in the cloister.
"Oh, tio!" the Rector exclaimed, when at last he was alone with his uncle. "I can say that now, can't I! It was a tough job, but we pulled it off, didn't we? The Christ of the Grao stood by us fine! We'll figure up accounts by and by, eh? Now I'm going home to Dolores. And won't she be glad to see me!" And the pair walked off toward the distant village with scarcely a glance at the poor vessel.
Other pictures are found in the chapter-house, and a fine one of the crucifixion in the Jesus Chapel below it; but this is not the place to enter into the very difficult question of Portuguese painting, a question on which popular tradition throws only a misleading light by attributing everything to a more or less mythical painter, Grão Vasco, and on which all authorities differ, agreeing only in considering this St.
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