ore they were driven from the country by the Marques de Pombal.

CHAPTER XIV

THE COMING OF THE FOREIGN ARTISTS

If Joao de Castilho and his brother Diogo were really natives of one of
the Basque provinces, they might rightly be included among the foreign
artists who played such an important part in Portugal towards the end of
Dom Manoel's reign and the beginning of that of his son, Dom Joao III.
Yet the earlier work of Joao de Castilho at Thomar shows little trace of
that renaissance influence which the foreigners, and especially the
Frenchmen, were to do so much to introduce.

[Sidenote: Santa Cruz, Coimbra.]

A great house of the Canon Regular of St. Augustine had been founded at
Coimbra by Dom Affonso Henriques for his friend Sao Theotonio in 1131.
But with the passage of centuries the church and monastic building of
Sta. Cruz had become dilapidated, and were no longer deemed worthy of so
wealthy and important a body. So in 1502 Dom Manoel determined to
rebuild them and to adorn the church, and it was for this adorning that
he summoned so many sculptors in stone and in wood to his aid.

The first architect of the church was Marcos Pires, to whom are due the
cloister and the whole church except the west door, which was finished
by his successor Diogo de Castilho with the help of Master Nicolas, a
Frenchman.

One Gregorio Lourenco seems to have been what would now be called master
of the works, and from his letters to Dom Manoel we learn how the work
was going on. After Dom Manoel's death in 1521 he writes to Dom Joao
III., telling him what, of all the many things his father the late king
had ordered, was already finished and what was still undone.

The church consists of a nave of four bays, measuring some 105 feet by
39, with flanking chapels, the whole lined with eighteenth-century
tiles, mostly blue and white. There are also a great choir gallery at
the west end, a chancel, polygonal

[Illustration: FIG. 68.

LISBON.

CONCEICAO VELHA.]

within but square outside, 54 feet long by 20 broad, with a
seventeenth-century sacristy to the south, a cloister to the north, and
chapels, one of which was the chapter-house, forming a kind of passage
from sacristy to cloister behind the chancel.

By 1518 the church must have been already well advanced, for in January
of that year Gregorio Lourenco writes to Dom Manoel saying that 'the
wall of the dormitory was shaken and therefore I have sent for "Pere
A