Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/255

Rh of the body of the new church, the choir and the famous Chapter House. The Charola remained the High Altar, its solemn aspect enhanced by three magnificent Gothic canopies, while recessed on the walls of the polygon were pictures, painted when art was at its zenith, by the famous school called Gothic-Portuguese, of which Grão Vasco was the noted representative. Only four of these really valuable paintings now remain. After hearing from many sources that the French were responsible for the loss of the others, it came as a shock to be told by Senhor Pinheiro, a resident in the town, that two of the missing paintings were to be found in a London gallery, where he had seen them himself, and marked them in the catalogue as pictures from the Convent of Thomar. The woodcarvings of the choir and stalls of the monks were superb, according to historical records and ancient engravings, rivalling the most famous of European cathedrals, but of all the magnificence not a trace remains. Only a dark stain on the stone floor witnesses to a fire which was fed with costly fuel of this ornamentation by soldiers of the French invading army, though Veira Guimarães, in his learned and highly interesting work on the Order of Christ, magnanimously attributes the loss to ignorance and national rapine rather than to the foreigner.

The south exterior is marked by elaborately carved, pinnacled buttresses, with two fine windows between, sunk in a diminishing series of pointed arches, and decorated with dainty coral tracery and niches for statues. The famous portal, one of the most characteristic of the Manueline works of art of the period, is beneath an arch, carried to the height of the church. Beneath the pendant, lace-like ornamentation of the arch, is carved the armillary sphere, entwined with decorative mouldings of flower and foliage drooping to a graceful pedestal, which 191