We spent the afternoon in the late 1960s splendours of the Gulbenkian Museum, originally planned by Kenneth Clark at the back of the National Gallery, but lost to London because of hostility to Gulbenkian’s tax arrangements.

A bas-relief of Princess Merytites:-

An ebony funerary head:-

An ornamental New Kingdom spoon:-

The priest Ameneminet:-

A piece of Ottoman velvet from Bursa:-

A case of Mamluk glass bottles:-

And Iznik tiles:-

More velvet:-

On to medieval French ivories:-

And St. Catherine by Rogier van der Weyden:-

Carpaccio’s trees (evidence of Venetian multiculturalism):-

After all the talk of Civilisation(s), it’s a pleasure to see such a wide-ranging collection which demonstrates so clearly the cross-fertilisation of cultures across the medieval Middle East.

For those people who think that I should have bought Elvas plums (Ameixas d’Elvas) in Elvas, it looks as if they are easier to buy in Fortnum and Mason: a delicacy perfected by the nuns of the Alentejo, made from greengage plums, introduced to England alongside port and enjoyed by the Duke of Wellington at his banquets, the plums are apparently harvested in July and then cooked and soaked in vats of sugarcane spirit for six weeks before being packaged up in beautiful round wooden boxes as a Christmas treat. At least it will be easy for me to get a box when I’m back in England. I have a feeling that Leila sells them as well.

The more I read about Catherine of Braganza the more interesting she becomes: normally treated as dreary and uninteresting besides Charles’s many mistresses, as well as boringly pious, she brought her own Portuguese singer with her and employed Giovanni Sebenico, a Croatian composer, as Master of the Italian music of her chapel at St. James’s. When he left London in 1673, he was replaced by Giovanni Battista Draghi, who continued to work for her until her return to Portugal in 1692. These Italians apparently influenced Purcell, whose first trio sonatas were published as ‘a just imitation of the most Italian masters’. So, we owe her more than just tea and marmalade.

Close to the border with Spain and with a frontier castle, we visited Elvas.

The church of Santa Maria de Alcáçova, on the site of a mosque:-

The back of the church of the Dominicas, with its carved heads:-

The main square, facing on to the old Cathedral:-

And back streets full of coats-of-arms:-

We went to Vila Viçosa, the sixteenth-century palace built by the Dukes of Braganza, where Catherine of Braganza was born in 1638 and where she played blind man’s buff;  but the palace had no disabled access, so instead we explored the streets of the town:-

It is hard to convey how unspoilt this part of the Alto Alentejo is:  a large agricultural estate which has been preserved for generations without much change in the basic arboriculture by the Rodrigues family.   I keep remembering a comment by my old English teacher that we have lost the ability to hear silence, which means silence out to the distant horizon without aeroplane, car or machine, more unusual than one might think.   I don’t know if my photographs in any way convey it:-

Staying in the Alentejo has got me interested in relations between Catherine of Braganza and Charles II, who she married in 1661, leaving the great palace of Vila Viçosa, east of Estremoz, and bringing with her, according to the terms of her marriage treaty, 2 million cruzados (although this was never entirely paid), Tangier and Bombay. She set up court at St. James’s Palace, where a Catholic chapel was made available for her and, rather amazingly, established a convent known as The Friary in 1665 occupied by Portuguese Franciscans. In 1671, she moved her entourage to Somerset House and Charles II seems constantly to have considered the possibility of divorcing her, as many encouraged him to do, as she was both heirless and a Catholic. But he never quite got round to it. She attended him in his final illness, commissioning a bust of him after his death, and falling into ‘a profound depression and melancholy’, before returning to Portugal in 1692, where she was, for a short time before her own death in 1705, Regent.

I have discovered that the manor house we visited yesterday – not officially open to the public and at the end of a long track across fields – is called Sempre Noiva (‘forever new’) and is described by José Saramago in his Journey to Portugal as ‘a fine work of architecture, were it not so over-decorated with inauthentic decorations.   Despite all this, the building itself, dating from around 1500, sustains a sense of proportion resulting from the application of the golden mean to its central structure, a name the gilded youth who flocked there richly merited’:-

On the way back we stopped off at Nossa Senhora da Graça do Divor, a small village just off the main road to Arraiolos, with a sixteenth-century church:-

We stopped to photograph a lichen-covered gate:-

And a track flanked by stones:-

Before turning off down a mud track in search of a fourteenth-century manor house in the middle of fields:-

We were en route for Évora, the dusty, blue-and-white relic of Portugal’s sixteenth-century court, with its well-preserved, but largely reconstructed Roman temple:-

The cathedral has fine carved apostles on either side of the late Gothic portico:-

A good cloister:-

And a very elaborately decorated shrine to the Madonna in the nave:-

Nearby is the Convento de Lóios, now a pousada:-

But what we liked best were the strange, oversize, carved Continents perched on the façade of the Convento da Graça:-