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Updated: May 20, 2025
The design of the whole is still very Manoelino, and therefore the master of the royal tombs spoken of by Gregorio Lourenço was probably a Portuguese, but the skill shown in modelling the figures and the renaissance details are something quite new. Many Frenchmen are known to have worked in Santa Cruz.
It is the chef-d'oeuvre of the Manoelino style, and although a foreigner may be inclined at first, from its very strangeness, to call it Eastern, it is really only a true development in the hands of a real artist of what Manoelino was; an expression of Portugal's riches and power, and of the gradual assimilation of such Moors as still remained on this side the Straits.
Except the two round buttresses at the west end and one on the north side which has Manoelino pinnacles, all are the same, breaking into a cluster of Gothic pinnacles rather more than half-way up and ending in one large square crocketed pinnacle very like those at Batalha.
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.
Nothing can exceed the ugliness of the new domed tower of the church of Belem, or of the upper story imposed on the long undercroft. Nor can the new railway station in the Manoelino style be admired.
The vault of many ribs, varying in arrangement in the different walks, is entirely Gothic, while all the doors except the double opening leading to the chapter-house, which has beautifully carved renaissance panels on the jambs are Manoelino.
At Beja the church of the Conceição, founded by Dom Manoel's father, has been very much pulled about, but the cornice and parapet with Gothic details, rope mouldings, and twisted pinnacles still show that it also was built when the new Manoelino style was first coming into use.
At the top runs a frieze of most elaborate hammered and pierced work early renaissance in detail in the centre, Gothic in the side arches, above which comes in the centre a wonderful cresting. In the middle, over the gate which rises as high as the top of the cresting, is a large trefoil made of a flat hammered band intertwined with a similar band after the manner of a Manoelino doorway.
Manoelino architects had always been fond of bundles of round mouldings and so naturally used them here, nor indeed are the piers at all like either the Kutub or the minars at Ahmedabad. They have not the batter or the sharp angles of the one, nor the innumerable breaks and mouldings of the others.
Judging also from the style, for the windows show many well-known Manoelino features, while the detail of the great south door is more purely Gothic, they too and the walls may be the work of Boutaca or of Lourenço Fernandes, while the great door is almost certainly that of João de Castilho.
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