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Thirdly, several details, as has been seen, appear to be more English than anything else, but they are none of them very important; the ridge ribs in the nave, the Welsh groining of the chancel vault, the general look of the pinnacles, a few pieces of stone panelling on buttresses or door, a small part of a few of the windows, the moulding of the chapter-house door, the leaves on the capitals of the Capella do Fundador, and the shape of the vine-leaves at the ends of the cuspings of the arches.
The trefoils form large hanging cusps in front of the complicated inner arch. This too is more or less trefoil in shape, but with smaller curves between the larger, and all elaborately fringed with cuspings and foliage. Four mouldings altogether are of this shape, two on each side, and beyond them towards the chapel is that arch or moulding which gives to the whole its most distinctive character.
There seems to be no record as to who worked or designed these tombs, but there can be little or no doubt that he was a Frenchman, the whole feeling, alike of the architectural detail and the figures themselves, is absolutely French; there had been no previous figure sculpture in the country in any way good enough to lead up to the skill in design and in execution here shown, nor, with regard to the mere architectural detail, had Gothic tracery and ornament yet been sufficiently developed for a native workman to have invented the elaborate cuspings, mouldings, and other enrichments which make both tombs so pre-eminent above all that came before them.
Two of its many mouldings are enriched with smaller cuspings, and one, the outermost, with a line of wavy tracery, while the whole ends in a crocketed ogee. Above the arch is a strip of shallow panelling, enclosed, as is the whole doorway, in a square moulded frame.
Some forty minutes away, on a small island to the east, is the Franciscan convent, La Badia, a building of the fifteenth century for the most part, containing a rather pretty cloister of white marble erected in 1477. The arches are stilted, pointed, and trefoiled, arranged in groups of three, with wider slightly segmental openings with cuspings for entrances.
The borders are still almost intact, but the rest of the relief ornament seems to have been wantonly hacked off out of pure mischief. I believe this is the only example of gesso work in any of Akbar's buildings. The treatment of the upper part of the walls with the characteristic cuspings of Arabian and Moorish architects is admirable.
Inside, the capitals of the chapel arches as well as their rich cuspings are very like those of the founder's chapel; the capitals having octagonal abaci and stiff vine-leaves, and the trefoiled cusps ending in square vine-leaves, while the arch mouldings are, as in King João's chapel, more English than French in section.
All these spaces are of some depth; each has in the centre a pendant, and in each the opening is fringed with tracery or foliation. In some are elaborate Gothic cuspings, in others long carved leaves curved at the ends; and in one which happens to come exactly over an iron tie-rod for the rods are placed quite irregularly the pendant is much longer and is joined to the tie by a small iron bar.
Here the horseshoe cuspings are on the out-most of the five orders of mouldings, and the chevron on the fourth, while there is also a series of pointed cusps on the second. Only the innermost betrays its really late origin by the curious crossing and interpenetrating of the mouldings of its large trefoiled head.
The mouldings are still so sharp, that they seem as lately from the chisel of the mason. The south transept window and door are the most perfect of the ruins. The day light of the window is twenty-four feet by sixteen, divided by four mullions. The tracery and cuspings are all of the decorated style of the Gothic. It is furnished with crotchets and creeping foliage.
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