Fancy Piecrust Architecture Tells Portugal’s Spicy, Globalist Story
Portugal’s fancy-edged homemade piecrust look to Gothic architecture is the style that cinnamon and clove spice built.
Spices sacked by the ship load in the ocean-bound Age of Discovery brought wealth and the exotic Near and Far East influence into Portugal and created its most ornamented, iconic historic buildings. Architecture enthusiasts know it as Manueline design, named in homage to King Manuel I—the Fortunate King—who ruled at the zenith of exploration success.
Preserved in castles, palaces—and cloistered monasteries which were built in exuberant prayerful thanks for great wealth—these images create brick and mortar landmarks to the Era when the tiny Iberian country was a leader among super powers.
Great old building lovers can recognize it by its stone edgings, portals and facades carved in ship detailing, maritime symbols and botanical embellishments that recall Portugal’s globalist history. It is composed from a riot of detailing—ship-rope spirals, knots and nets; swags of seaweed; shells, animal and plant carvings; the signature armillary sphere for navigation. The artistry immortalizes an age of possibility and expansion, our modern-era space travel.
Three Ways to Recognize the Manueline Style
Spy them easily, incorporated among the carved curlicues, three signature elements identify Manueline design.
- Armillary sphere, a celestial globe encircling earth, that looks like a hollowed-out rubber band ball but was the navigational tool sailors used to measure the positions of the stars. The artful orb became the personal emblem of King Manuel I. I think the Age of Discovery stretched across four centuries because few seamen could decipher how to properly engage the armillary sphere, which must have been more complex than a Rubik’s Cube.
- Cross of the Order of Christ, a symmetrically sided military order cross that emblazoned ships’ flags, represented the cash-flush association that bankrolled these ocean treasure hunts. The Order’s most famous member was Prince Henry the Navigator, who himself was a sailing conqueror of Queta, Morocco, early in his career but later was noted for securing the funding for Age of Discovery sea jaunts and training willing navigators. Prince Henry was a distant uncle of King Manuel I.
- Coat of arms of King Manuel I, which is often seen incorporating the other two elements within or along with the shape of a battle shield or crest.
Form Follows Ecclesiastical Function
Though the search for Manueline design sightings drew me to the skinny western edge of the Iberian peninsula, I concede that Portugal didn’t send hundreds of sailors on year-long voyages of probable no return to circumnavigate the horn of Africa simply to create great architecture. It was the time between the 15th to the 18th centuries when continental Europe had all been claimed, or was in ongoing dispute, and another possibility for gaining land, wealth and power was to take to the ocean blue. Portugal wanted direct access to the lucrative spice wealth and delicacies of the Middle East and Africa. Imagine a life of custardy pastries devoid of cinnamon, most any dish at all absent of pepper. Negotiating with Spain or Italy as a conduit to obtaining the aromatic plant powders was expensive.
Thanks to the navigational genius of the explorer Vasco da Gama in swinging out wide around the horn of Africa to avoid violent, shoreline seas before turning back to follow its eastern coast, he reached spice trade hubs such as the city of Calicut on the Malabar Coast of India. Not a conquest achieved without bloodshed—but a part of history that could be examined in forums other than here—da Gama claimed many territories for Portugal and King Manuel I.
The “pepper tax,” amassed from the lucrative spice sales Portugal was marketing across Europe, financed construction of two of the most gob smacking Manueline design examples in Portugal: Monastery of Batalha in the village of Batalha and Monastery of the Jerónimos in Belem, just west of Lisbon.
An Extravagant Cloister at the Heart of the Matter
You do not have to be a church goer or even religious to appreciate the soul-fortifying grandeur of Central Portugal’s Batalha Monastery, built between the late 14th century and early 16th century. Stepping into the monastery’s Royal Cloister squared with its calliope of screen carvings is like the first sighting of a children’s Advent calendar and its treat-revealing compartments. You want to cross under every archway and open every inner door right away.
When touring historic monasteries and convents, never miss an opportunity to walk the perimeter of the cloister. Batalha's fanciful fretwork is among the genre's most grand.
The cloister’s courtyard perimeter exploded like the icing piping bag for a wedding cake squeezed into flourish overdrive. Columns, pillars and fretwork were shaped and textured into plants of the sea and ship lines, nuts and blooms. The three Manueline icons were prominently centered in the center screens and up in the ribbed ceiling vaults that tented the quadrangle walk path. Leafy stone swags and garlands draped portals and wrapped posts. From beneath and between every differently edged archway, I joined the brigade of iPhone photographers perched on the cloister ledges to ingest the cornflower sky backdrop for the art in stone. Watch this video for more detail.
My favorite portal off the cloister—forgive me, but even more so than the passage to the cathedral itself—led into the Chapter House. Once the monastery’s business meeting space, the damp, dimly lit room became Portugal’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier when the country interred the unidentified remains of two of its World War I servicemen there in 1921. An urn of Portuguese olive oil bore the eternal flame and two soldiers flanked the memorial. The space seized the quiet for contemplation and the magnificence of its 60-foot unsupported ceiling expanse to amplify the sacrifice. Despite two collapses during centuries-ago construction, Batalha’s architect at that time, Master Huguet, persevered to complete the self-supporting singular vault, which displayed an eight-pointed star edged in ornamented ribs.
An engineering and architectural feat, the unsupported 60-foot span of Batalha's vaulted Chapter House collapsed twice during early construction, but its visionary architect persevered and upon its completion slept beneath the dome to prove the soundness of its application.
Legend has it that when the construction scaffolding was dismantled, Huguet triumphantly spent the night under his vault to prove the space was safe. I lingered in the corner of the hall and wondered if the sleep over was a formal undertaking with a cot and bedding or if he simply stretched out on a pallet of old tarps. Huguet’s gutsy design prowess warranted him a career-long commission, including the gift of a home near Batalha but, oddly, the builder’s first name was unknown, unable to be found, not even in the official guidebook for the monastery.
The Royal Rotundas: Domes Not Necessarily Included
Huguet also designed the Founder’s Chapel, which he bathed in light that transformed the limestone of the royal tomb into the warm hue of a crème topped latte. With windows on each of its two-level octagon sides, the Founder’s Chapel soared from monochrome neutrals to color insets of the stained glass in the dome of the pantheon for King João I. He had commissioned the monastery to thank Nossa Senhora (the Virgin Mary) for Portugal’s triumph over Spain’s Castilian army in 1385, and called for the chapel within it as his resting place. The chapel emanated from King João I and Queen Philippa in a singular sculpture of funerary art, atop their joint tomb with right hands joined.
Bathed in kaleidoscope-colored light from the upper tiered windows, the funerary art in the Founder's Chapel features frilly carved stone and centers around the single tomb shared by King João I and Queen Philippa.
Lacework shrouded stone chests of drawers in the walls arched around them, containing the mausoleums of the royal children. Prince Henry the Navigator was the only heir of the four depicted in full funerary repose over his sepulcher. He shared, with his parents, the erector set-like marble carving that represented the royal crown. Huguet repeated his eight-pronged star vault for the rotunda to signifying renewal and new beginnings.
The Unfinished Chapel—commissioned, again, of Huguet, but by King João I’s son King Duarte—was the me-too future pantheon for him and Queen Leonor. The “unfinished” moniker didn’t simply refer to a few never filigreed side chapels. Huguet had planned to push to the extreme the unsupported dome vault technique from the Chapter House and the Founder’s Chapel but his aspiration never materialized.
Domeless, the Unfinished Chapel remains exposed to the sky and elements. King Duarte and Queen Leonor are still honored here, not at the open center but semi-protected within a side chapel.
Manueline pillars rising to nowhere create a crown-like effect for the Unfinished Chapel at Batalha.
Must a rotunda be actually topped by a dome to be memorable, to be great? I strode through the archway, into the lightness of Spring air and stared at sky. Rain remnants puddled in worn patches on the floor. Majestic support pillars, waiting for receipt of their next layer of construction, poked from the structure like teetering pieces left from a well-contested Jenga® game.
The originally intentioned centerpiece of the chapel, the dual effigy of King Duarte with Queen Leonor, also holding right hands, was tucked into a side chapel almost unnoticeable, still vulnerable to weather with glassy rain pools around its base. Instead, the triumphal 50-foot high, 25-foot wide Manueline style portal lured the eye. To be viewed from the roofless chapel space, the portal is sumptuously carved into a deep multilayered, trefoil arch. Varying moldings of ivy, artichokes, garlands and motifs of basketry and woven cloth were sandwiched into a thick arcade. This was considered Portugal’s most magnificent example of this fancy gothic design and was designed by a Huguet successor, Mateus Fernandes, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Fernandes was also credited with adding the Manueline details in the already lush royal cloister and in the tracery (ornamental outlining) of the Founder’s Chapel.
Considered Portugal’s most magnificent example of this fancy Gothic design, the deep multilayered, trefoil arch sandwiches varying moldings of ivy, artichokes, garlands and motifs of basketry and woven cloth into the majestic portal.
Fernandes exuberantly portrayed the adventurous spirit of King Manuel I and had finances allowed him to enclose the Unfinished Chapel, flourishes would have no doubt dripped from the buttressed octagonal dome. But King Manuel I’s plans shifted. In new heavenly thanks for Portugal’s success in the Age of Discovery, he diverted the pepper tax funding into the Monastery of the Jerónimos on the bank of the Tagus River just west of Lisbon. Explorers would then be able to worship before and after their daring stints of world navigation. Fernandes’ talents shifted south from Batalha to create that complex and, in fact, supervise the King’s commissioned designs across Portugal.
Though work at Batalha was left undone, Fernandes’ arch was so divine it sparked the adaptation of Manueline design across Portugal. The Monastery of the Jerónimos went onto become another grand implementation of Manueline architecture at the hand of Fernandes—though I think less extravagantly so—the master builder and his wife are entombed at Batahla. They rest beneath a marble floor slab near the arch and opposite the effigy of King Duarte and Queen Leonora.
Examples of Manueline style can be spotted across Portugal. Once you become keen on the look of the celestial-navigating armillary sphere, the design turns up everywhere. Sintra’s Pena Palace and the National Palace are among other stunning examples.
