Manueline Style

The Manueline style is the artistic expression of late Portuguese Gothic developed chiefly during the reign of King Manuel I, the Fortunate (1495-1521), continuing for some decades after his death. More than a new architecture, it is an essentially decorative and sculptural language, applied over structures of Gothic origin which, in a period of prosperity fuelled by the Discoveries, are clad in dense, exuberant and deeply symbolic ornamentation.

No other era gave Portugal a language so recognisable. Manueline architecture is, strictly speaking, less an autonomous style than a moment: the instant when late Gothic meets the wealth and imagery of the first globalisation — and the first truly Portuguese architectural signature.

Origin of the term

The designation is not contemporary: it was proposed only in 1842 by the Luso-Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen, in his Notícia Histórica e Descriptiva do Mosteiro de Belém, which associated the style with the monarch under whose reign it reached its height. Although convenient, the label tends to suggest a unity the phenomenon does not possess: the Manueline is not an architectural order with its own rules, but rather an ornamental repertoire superimposed on structural solutions inherited from Gothic architecture and, at times, already permeable to the early Renaissance.

A late Gothic, but not only

Structurally, the Manueline is Gothic: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, buttresses. The novelty lies in the ornamentation, which grows over these elements until it transforms them. On a base of Flamboyant Gothic are grafted Plateresque elements and Mudéjar and Oriental influences, giving rise to a profusion of motifs that simultaneously celebrate faith, monarchy and maritime adventure.

Decorative vocabulary

The originality of the Manueline resides in its iconographic programme.

For the first time in European art, the sea ceases to be a backdrop and becomes decorative matter: ropes, knots, anchors, shells, coral and seaweed invade portals and vaults as though the stone had been fished from the ocean.

Sailors’ cables and knots are joined by naturalistic elements — artichokes, pine cones, thistles, foliage, exotic fauna — and the great emblems of royal power, notably the armillary sphere, Manuel’s personal device, and the Cross of the Order of Christ. Twisted columns, multifoil arches and vegetal mouldings complete a system that privileges plastic effect and the richness of the surface over clarity of structure.

The wealth that financed it

The Manueline is inseparable from its economy. The great works of the reign — the Jerónimos, Tomar, the Monastery of Batalha in its final phase, the Tower of Belém — were paid for with the gold and spices of the ocean routes opened by the Expansion. Nautical ornamentation is not innocent decoration: it is propaganda, the inscription of the imperial project in the stone of the churches.

A synthesis of worlds

What makes the Manueline fascinating is its hybridity. Within it coexist Flemish Gothic, Castilian Plateresque, Mudéjar echoes and, at times, motifs from India and North Africa that artists reinterpreted. It is the architecture of a country that, within a couple of decades, came into contact with almost the whole known world — and recorded that vertigo in the very material of its monuments.

The great monuments and their masters

The Manueline asserts itself in exceptional works, the work of a remarkable group of masters. The Jerónimos Monastery, in Belém, begun by Diogo Boitaca and continued by João de Castilho, offers in its south portal and cloister the most complete synthesis of the style. Nearby, the Tower of Belém, designed by Francisco de Arruda, combines military tradition with loggias and decorative merlons of Moroccan inspiration.

In Tomar, the celebrated Chapter House Window of the Convent of Christ, attributed to Diogo de Arruda, raises the motif of the rope and the armillary sphere to the limits of sculptural virtuosity. It is the manifesto of the style: a tangle of stone that turns the wall into an instant of controlled exuberance. At the Monastery of Batalha, Mateus Fernandes signed the portal of the Unfinished Chapels, where the stone lacework reaches an almost obsessive density. To these are added interventions in churches, portals and cloisters across the kingdom, from the Algarve to Trás-os-Montes.

End and legacy

Around 1540, the advance of the more sober and rational classical Renaissance rendered the Manueline obsolete. Lasting little more than a generation, it is a style datable almost to the decade: to encounter it is to place oneself, with precision, in the brief and dazzled apogee of the Portuguese Renaissance.

The style remained, however, in the national memory as the artistic expression of the golden age of the Discoveries. In the nineteenth century, the Romantic movement revived its vocabulary in the Neo-Manueline style, which ornamented stations, palaces and pavilions with quotations from the sixteenth-century grammar. Today, the Manueline is recognised as one of Portugal’s most original contributions to the history of European art.