dest part of the building,
but all, except the two outer apses and the upper part of the central,
have been concealed by the Pateo built by Dom Manoel to unite the
church with the Capellas Imperfeitas, or unfinished chapels, beyond.
Here there is nothing very unusual: the smaller chapels all end in
three-sided apses, at whose angles are buttresses, remarkable only for
the great number of string courses, five in all, which divide them
horizontally; these buttresses are finished by two offsets just below a
plain corbel table which is now crowned by an elaborately pierced and
cusped parapet which may well have been added later. Each side of the
apse has one tall narrow single-light window which, filled at some later
date from top to bottom with elaborate stone tracery, has two thin
shafts at each side and a rather bluntly-pointed head. The central apse
has been much the same but with five sides, and two stories of similar
windows one above the other. So far there is nothing unexpected or what
could not easily have been developed from already existing buildings,
such as the church at Thomar or the Franciscan and Dominican churches no
further away than Pontevedra in Galicia.
Coming to the south transept, there is a large doorway below under a
crocketed gable flanked by a tall pinnacle on either side. This door
with its thirteenth-century mouldings is one of the most curious and
unexpected features of the whole building. Excepting that the capitals
are well carved with leaves, it is a close copy of the west door of Sao
Francisco at Santarem. 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. All this
is thoroughly Portuguese and clearly derived from what had gone before;
but the same cannot be said for the crockets or for the pinnacles with
their square and gabled spirelets. These crockets are of the common
vine-leaf shape such as was used in England and also in France early in
the fourteenth century, while the two-storied pinnacles with shallow
traceried panels on each face, and still more the square spirelets with
rather large crockets and a large bunchy finial, are not at all French,
but a not bad imitation of contemporary English work. On the gable above
the door
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