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Updated: May 20, 2025
It is much less elaborate than the great south door, but shows great ingenuity in fitting it in under what was once the porch vault. The twisted and broken curves of the head follow a common Manoelino form, and below the top of the broken hood-mould are two flying angels who support a large corbel on which is grouped the Holy Family.
They are surrounded by a broad hollow splay framed by thin shafts resting on corbels and bearing a head, a flat ogee in shape, but broken by two hanging points; one of the most common shapes for a Manoelino window. One more doorway before ending this chapter, already too long.
In place of the large Manoelino window, which was begun on all the other seven sides, João de Castilho here built two renaissance arches, each of two orders, of which the broader springs from the square pilasters and the narrower from candelabrum shafts. In front there run up to the cornice three beautiful shafts standing on high pedestals which rest
The whole is a very curious piece of work, the capitals and bases being, with the exception of some details at Thomar and at Batalha, the most strange of the details of that period, though, were the small corbels left out, they would differ but little from other Manoelino capitals, while the bases may be only an attempt of a Moorish workman to copy the interpenetration of late Gothic.
Whatever may be thought of the chancel, there is no doubt about the large western porch, which is quite free of any Manoelino fantasies.
Sometimes these Manoelino designs, as in the palace at Cintra, are really beautiful when the parts are small and do not straggle all over the surface, but sometimes as in the Marvilla door at Santarem, or in that of the convent of the Madre de Deus at Lisbon, the mouldings are so clumsy and the design so sprawling and ill-connected, that they can only be looked on as curiosities of architectural aberration.
However, a most diligent search in the Victoria and Albert Museum through endless photographs of Indian buildings failed to find anything which was really at all like them, and this helped to confirm the belief that this resemblance is more fancied than real; besides, the other strange features, the west window outside, and the south window, now a door, are surely nothing more than Manoelino realism gone a little mad.
Inside, the church consists of a nave of four bays with side chapels in one of which there is a beautiful Manoelino font transepts and chancel with a drumless dome over the crossing. In some respects the likeness to São Vicente is very considerable; there are coupled Doric pilasters between the chapels, the barrel vault is coffered, and the chapel arches are extremely plain.
At the top a cresting, simpler than that elsewhere, below a round window without tracery, lower still two picturesque square rococo windows, and at the bottom a rather elaborate Manoelino doorway, built not many years ago to replace one of the same date as the windows above. Throughout the clerestory windows are not large.
Half-way along each walk two of the columns are set more closely together, and between them is a small round arch, with below it a Manoelino trefoil; there is too in the north-west corner a lavatory with a good flat vault.
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