THE CONVENT OF MADRE DE DEUS

The foundation of the Convent of Madre de Deus – meaning Mother of God – goes back to the earlier years of the sixteenth century.

It was in 1509 that Queen Leonor (Eleanor), widow of King John II, resolved to build a spiritual retreat where she might end her days and choose her grave «as one poor», in a corner of the cloister, under a stone without ornament, which could be trod underfoot.

In the decline of a life then calm and pious, but once shaken by tragic incidents and bitter sorrows, the widowed Queen had given herself over altogether to works of charity and piety. After having seen her own brother, the Duke of Viseu, fail under the dagger of the King her husband, and the head of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Bragança, roll on the scaffold, both of them convicted of plotting against the person of the King, she knew the bitterer pain of losing her only son, the heir to the Crown, killed in youth by a fall from a horse. Some years after, her own royal husband died, of a lingering and merciless disease, which some think due to poisoning; and he died away from her and the Court, the greater bitterness being that many thought her an accomplice in the presumed unnatural death.

After the King's decease, in 1495, Queen Eleanor turned her back on the brilliancy and splendor of court life, and gave herself over to the Christian task of helping the poor and the sick, the orphaned and the unhappy. About 1498 she founded in Lisbon the Misericordias (Mercies), that peculiar institution which was to spread all over the country, to come down in full activity to our own days, and to extend to the Colonies and Brazil.

It was this ache of a life made deep and rich by charity that led her to seek sanctuary in a convent of Franciscan nuns, which she herself established and where thenceforward her life was to be spent – not, indeed, wholly apart from the world, for her charitable activities brought her constantly back to it.

So in 1509, having founded a small church and a little convent, she installed nine nuns there. The first abbess, a great lady of her own family, lies by her side, in a corner of the Renaissance cloister, between the emblems of the Queen – the fisherman's net into which her son's body was taken up – and of the King – the symbolic pelican which bleeds its breast to feed its little ones.

But this grand Renaissance cloister, strikingly noble in design – the lower part in large round arches, the higher a colonnade with threefold intervals between the pillars –, is a later work.

We know that the convent church was opened exactly on the loth, June 1509, and the classic style of that Tuscan cloister is its own witness that it dates, without possibility of doubt, from about thirty years later.

Apart from this, there is abundant contemporary evidence that in the reign of King John III, Queen / 19 / Eleanor's nephew, considerable alterations and expansions were made in the work, even in the Gothic part. Then, the great earthquake in 1755 did such damage to sixteenth century buildings that the extensive ulterior repairs leave us guessing as to what the original «Madre de Deus» was really like. Only the tower is the same, as to shape and place, as it originally was. Even the southern entry is no more than a (not very felicitous) recent reconstruction of the Manueline doorway we can see pictured on the wings of the St. Auta triptych (see plate 21).

We must have recourse to an engraving by Stoop (circa 1640) to obtain some idea of what this convent then looked like, set as it was on the bank of the Tagus, and so near the river that sometimes the faithful were foam-swept on entering.

The minor cloister (see plates 3 and 4), though altogether rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and in spite of the stucco which covers its voussoirs, does nevertheless retain, as a whole, something of its original charm. And the late restorer found nothing better than to insert a railway engine in one of its Gothic capitals, as an obvious tribute to progress.

Before entering the church as it now is, several appendages must be crossed, as, for example, the Chapel of St. Anthony (see plate 5), a rectangular room with, at one end, the altar dedicated to the miracle-worker, who was born in Lisbon. The walls are covered with pictures in glazed tiles. The upper part, as also the ceiling, is in woodwork and comprises a series of eighteenth century paintings, representing several passages in St. Anthony's life. The antechoir, which follows, belongs to the same period. Thence we pass to the high choir (see plates 6 to 11), a vast roam wholly covered with paintings, from the stalls to the polyhedral ceiling.

The whole is remarkably sumptuous, with its carved woodwork, its painted panels, its many precious reliquaries, in many shapes and forms, and its multicolored flooring, in island timbers. It is a typical example of those interiors of convents of which royal munificence was prodigal in Portugal.

Some of the paintings are really remarkable and of museum status. We may mention the portraits of King John III, with St. John, on the one side (see plate 10); and, facing this, of Queen Catherine, his wife, sister of Philip II of Spain (see plate 11). They are kneeling, hands joined in prayer, in the usual attitude of donators. These two paintings belong to the sixteenth century Portuguese school and are supposed to be by Christovam Lopes.

In these same corners, on the two sides of the large opening over the nave of the church, there is a series of large panels, deriving almost certainly from a big disconnected altar-piece by some great Portuguese master, of the beginning of the sixteenth century, whom it has been hitherto impossible definitely to identify. They represent: The Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi (plate 9), The Delivery of the Rule of the Order to St. Claire (plate 10) on the Gospel side; on the Epistle Side, a Pentecost of the same series.

In the same corner we find a very large panel which really seems to have been a present to Queen Eleanor from Emperor Maximilian. It represents, as tradition goes, a Panorama of Palestine, but it should rather be called Jerusalem and Calvary, inasmuch as it clearly shows the Temple of Solomon, as the primitives conceived it, several pieces connected with the life of Christ, and, on high, the profile of Mount Calvary, with the scene of crucifixion (plate 23). / 20 /

In the foreground, painted by a less skilled hand, there is a portrait of Queen Eleanor, in black, with covered head.

The empty spaces show the place of the three panels which the Museum Department withdrew from there.

We will make no particular reference to the reliquaries, one of which is said once to have contained a thorn from the Crown of Jesus and the other the Holy Shroud itself.

On the lower floor we find ourselves within the precincts of the original church. It is today a kind of narthex, full of old (sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century) paintings, but it, is so badly lit that they can hardly be seen (plate 12). Some tombs with Gothic inscriptions are witnesses to the age of the place.

The nave of the present church is set right forward from the narthex, but a little higher up, a few steps intervening.

The sense of opulence subsists (see plates 13 and 14), but the surroundings are wholly eighteenth century ones. Two enormous glazed file panels go halfway up the walls, which enclose the rococo woodwork of a pulpit and of a double door. Then a balustrade in partitioned marble separates the nave from the high altar. The higher part of the temple is covered with wood carvings containing numerous paintings, the whole done after the 1755 earthquake. The pictures, however, are often earlier and some are worth attention. Some fragments of an early sixteenth century reredos, set in the rather too overdone classical style of the high altar, are particularly deserving of attention. (See plate 15).

At the bottom of the church, on the left, there is a royal tribune (plate 16). Finally, a little door on the right opens into the vestry (plate 24), a small roam but full of art treasures.

Over a large eighteenth century piece of furniture there are several small primitive panels, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century and closely related to the admirable triptych of St. Auta (one of the 11,000 virgins of the Golden Legend, her body belonging to this convent), which formed part of the Exhibition of Portuguese Art at the Jeu de Paume in 1931.

This triptych was never sent back to Madre de Deus, but it may be seen in the Old Art Museum at Lisbon.