Category: Sintra2017

In 1348 St Stephen’s Chapel was completed.  Sited in the centre of the Palace of Westminster, the blank walls of the new building presented Edward III with an opportunity to create a new iconography of kingship. Between 1348 and 1363 the king and his craftsmen transformed the chapel’s surface into one of the most elaborate royal decorative programmes of the fourteenth century, including painted masonry, Old Testament narratives, sculptures,...

From the 1530s to the 1560s, duke Teodosio de Bragança conducted a series of major construction campaigns in his family’s palace in Vila Viçosa providing the building with a new wing faced with a splendid marble façade (the first secular renaissance façade in the country) and a series of new rooms. Among these, a monumental staircase leads to an also new great hall of grand proportions, decorated with expensive...

Sintra became popular with the royal family as Queen Philippa of Lancaster received from King João I the rents and the properties of the town. Besides, the King set about rebuilding the royal lodgings around 1415. Sintra was rewarded by a series of royal visits from medieval times to Renaissance. Kings and its court stayed there on a number of occasions and seem to have particularly favoured the royal...

Après avoir reçu de son frère, le roi Charles V, le duché de Touraine en 1364, Louis Ier d’Anjou engagea la construction d’un palais neuf dans l’enceinte du château de Loches (France, Indre-et-Loire). De cette résidence princière, il reste aujourd’hui un corps de logis prolongé par une tour circulaire et une grande terrasse édifiée sur les voûtes d’une rampe cavalière. L’étude archéologique de l’ensemble, menée dans le cadre de...

Medieval descriptions of royal state-rooms can offer important clues on how to understand these spaces. We cannot always expect them to describe existing decorations. In many cases they demonstrably did not. But, to bring their panegyric or parodistic intentions to bear, the authors necessarily had to refer to the real world experience of their audience—and to surpass it. The following questions arise: Which popular topoi are referred to? Which...