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Updated: May 8, 2025
Like the cathedral at Evora, some of the arches in the Templar Church at Thomar are pointed, yet like it again, it is entirely romanesque both in construction and in detail. The Knights Templars were already established in Portugal in 1126.
Cruz at Coimbra, where the buttresses run up to the roof of the upper story and where the arches of that story are almost flat. The Milagre or Miracle church at Santarem is so called because it stands near where the body of St. Irene, martyred by the Romans at Nabantia, now Thomar, after floating down the Nabão, the Zezere, and the Tagus, came to shore and so gave her name to Santarem.
Behind, the whole space is spanned by a three-centred arch, panelled like the passage arches at Thomar. All the work is most exquisite, but it is not easy to see how the horizontal cornice was to be brought into harmony with the higher windows intended on the other seven sides, nor does the renaissance detail, beautiful though it is, agree very well with the exuberant Manoelino of the rest.
The church too is very poor, though the private chapel with barrel vault and white marble dome is better, yet the whole building shows, like the Graça porch, that classic architecture was not yet fully understood, for Diogo de Torralva had not yet finished his cloister at Thomar, nor had Terzi begun to work in Lisbon.
It rests on the Corinthian capital of a very bulbous baluster, is square, and has on each side four beautiful little Corinthian columns, fluted and surrounded with large acanthus leaves at the bottom. Almost exactly like it, but round and with balusters instead of columns, is the pulpit in the church of Nossa Senhora dos Olivaes at Thomar.
So far, beyond the great refinement of the details, there has been nothing very characteristic of João de Castilho, but when we find that the pilasters of the choir and apse, as well as the choir and transept arches, are panelled in that very curious way with strips crossing each other at long intervals to form diamonds which João employed in the passage arches in the Thomar dormitory and in the loggia at Batalha, it would be natural enough to conclude that this chapel is his work, and indeed the best example of what he could do with classic details.
Aumale dandled the children in the chimney-corner, thereby winning their fond affections, while I set to work to make love to the mistress of the establishment, a stout and not altogether illiterate lady for she could swear in any language. Thomar! Were you ever at Thomar? Did you ever even hear of it?
There he had found Master Nicolas Chantranez already at work, and there he learned, perhaps from him, so to change his style that by the time he returned to Thomar to work for Dom João III. in 1528 he was able to design buildings practically free from that Gothic spirit which is still found in his latest work at Belem.
Again the vaulting of the apse in São João de Alporão is arranged very much in the way which was almost universal during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the chancels and side chapels of many a church, such as Santa Maria do Olival at Thomar, or the Graça at Santarem itself, and the curious boat-like corbels of São João are found more than once, as in the choir of the old church, formerly the cathedral of Silves, far south in the Algarve.
Except the Frenchmen at Coimbra no one played a greater part in this change than João de Castilho, who, no doubt, first learned about the renaissance from Master Nicolas at Belem; Thomar also, his own home, lies about half-way between Lisbon and Coimbra, so that he may well have visited his brother Diogo at Santa Cruz and seen what other Frenchmen were doing there and so become acquainted with better architects than Master Nicolas; but in any case, who ever it may have been who taught him, he planned at Thomar, after his return there, the first buildings which are wholly in the style of the renaissance and are not merely decorated with renaissance details.
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