e Italian features, but they have not been treated exactly
as was done there, or as was to be done in Portugal some fifty years
later, so that it seems more likely that Joao de Castilho got his
knowledge of Italian work at second-hand, perhaps from one of the men
sent there by Dom Manoel, and not by having been there himself.

No other building in this style can be surely ascribed to him, and no
other is quite so pleasing, yet there are several in which refined
classic detail of a similar nature is used, and one of the best of these
is the small church of the Milagre at Santarem. As for the cloisters
which are mentioned later, they have much in common with Joao de
Castilho's work at Thomar, as, for instance, in the Claustros da Micha,
or the Claustro da Hospedaria; in the latter especially the upper story
suggests the arrangement which became so common.

This placing of a second story with horizontal architrave on the top of
an arched cloister is very common in Spain, and might have been
suggested by such as are found at Lupiana or at Alcala de Henares,[155]
but these are not divided into bays by buttresses, so it is more likely
that they were borrowed from such a cloister as that of Sta. Cruz at
Coimbra, where the buttresses run up to the roof of the upper story and
where the arches of that story are almost flat.

[Sidenote: Santarem, Milagre.]

The Milagre or Miracle church at Santarem is so called because it stands
near where the body of St. Irene, martyred by the Romans at Nabantia,
now Thomar, after floating down the Nabao, the Zezere, and the Tagus,
came to shore and so gave her name to Santarem.

The church is small, being about sixty-five feet long by forty wide. It
has three aisles, wooden panelled roofs, an arcade resting on Doric
columns, and at the east a sort of transept followed by an apse. The
piers to the west side of this transept are made up of four pilasters,
all of different heights. The highest, the one on the west side, has a
Corinthian capital and is enriched in front by a statue under a canopy
standing on a corbel upheld by a slender baluster shaft. The second in
height is plain, and supports the arch which crosses the central aisle.
The arches opening from the aisles into the transept chapel are lower
still, and rest, not on capitals, but on corbels. Like the nave arch, on
their spandrels heads are carved looking out of circles. Lowest of
all--owing to the barrel vault which covers the centr