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Updated: June 23, 2025
The main vault is a pointed barrel with bold ribs; it is held up by a half-barrel over the aisles, which have groined vaults with very large transverse arches.
With this burst of ferocious yells, which were fearfully re-echoed from the groined arches of the cathedral, the mob, maddened by rage, rushed towards the choir, at the door of which Gabriel was standing.
In that work, which was on a groined vaulting, Taddeo painted the four Evangelists, two Sibyls, two Prophets, and four not very large stories of Jesus Christ and of the Virgin His Mother.
Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago.
The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals.
The south door of the chancel with its handsome porch and groined roof; the vaulted chamber, or so-called cloister, outside the south transept, the use of which is unknown; the recessed tomb in the north transept and the grand arch on the same side of the church; all call for especial notice.
Instead of the conventional Madonna and Child, and groups of saints and angels, we have here whole legends represented in a series of pictures of almost dramatic character. In the four triangular compartments of the groined vaulting are the three vows of the Franciscan Order, namely, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, and in the fourth the glorification of the saint.
The building has been damaged repeatedly by earthquakes and the repairs made have changed its original outer appearance on the plaza side. In its roof there is still lodged a cannon-ball fired into the city by a Spanish battery during the siege of 1809. In the interior, great pillars of a soft dark-red tint support the high groined arches and the effect is severe and impressive.
Altogether it is not at all easy to say whence those peculiarities of tracery and detail which make Batalha so strange and unusual a building were derived, except that there had been in Portugal nothing to lead up to such tracery or to such elaboration of detail, or to the constructive skill needed to build the high groined vaults of the nave or the enormous span required to cover the chapter-house.
A bishop chanting his psalter under the groined roof of cathedral, and a covenanter praying in his hill-side cave, would form an admirable picture of two very different styles of devotion. There were some dozen of old women on the floor, whom the mixed motive of saying their prayers and picking up a chance alms seemed to have drawn thither. From the Duomo we went to the King's palace.
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