Belem owes
its three aisles of equal height to his initiative even though they were
actually carried out by some one else.

Judging also from the style, for the windows show many well-known
Manoelino features, while the detail of the great south door is more
purely Gothic, they too and the walls may be the work of Boutaca or of
Lourenco Fernandes, while the great door is almost certainly that of
Joao de Castilho.

In any case, when Joao de Castilho came the building was not nearly
finished, for in 1522 he received a thousand cruzados towards building
columns and the transept vault.[130]

But even more important to the decoration of the building than either
Boutaca or Joao de Castilho was the coming of Master Nicolas, the
Frenchman[131] whom we shall see at work at Coimbra and at Sao Marcos.
Belem seems to have been the first place to which he came after leaving
home, and we soon find him at work there on the statues of the great
south door, and later on those of the west door, where, with the
exception of the Italian door at Cintra, is carved what is probably the
earliest piece of renaissance detail in the country.

The south door, except for a band of carving round each entrance, is
free of renaissance detail, and so was probably built before Nicolas
added the statues, but in the western a few such details begin to
appear, and in these, as in the band round the other openings, he may
have had a hand. Inside renaissance detail is more in evidence, but
since the great piers would not be carved till after they were built, it
is more likely that the renaissance work there is due to Joao de
Castilho himself and to what he had learned either from Nicolas or

[Illustration: FIG. 62.

TORRE DE SAO VICENTE.

BELEM.]

[Illustration: FIG. 63.

BELEM.

SACRISTY.]

from the growing influence of the Coimbra School. It is, of course, also
possible that when Nicolas went to Coimbra, where he was already at work
in 1524, some French assistant may have stayed behind, yet the carving
on the piers is rather coarser than in most French work, and so was more
probably done by Portuguese working under Castilho's direction.

The monastic buildings were begun after the church; but although at
first renaissance forms seem supreme in the cloisters, closer inspection
will show that they are practically confined to the carving on the
buttresses and on the parapets of the arches thrown across from buttress
to buttress. All the rest,