I had to climb the city again (when you are in an apartment on the river, the only way to go is up!) to get coffee this morning, so I continued on my way to the Clerigos Tower. In 1763 it was the highest bell tower in Portugal and it's a great way to get view of the city. I can tell you that it did impress me to see how large Porto really is, which my experience in the historic quarter hasn't really exposed me to. For a 220 step walk up a spiral staircase tower, that was a good thing.
But that's not the new perspective I was most interested in from my visit to the tower. There's a beautiful church attached to the tower and a museum with religious art. In addition to showcasing many representations of Jesus, there was a room with a collection of crucifixion carvings. I am not Christian so I want to be sensitive here, and admit I know very little about this. What amazed me was the interpretation of those carvings, not as "this is what art was like in this time period or this is what the carver thought feet looked like" but as a philosophical question. The position of Jesus's arms, not just as a question of historical accuracy (some say the Shroud of Turin clearly indicates that Jesus's arms were raised skyward, as on a T shaped structure, not stretched out at his sides on a + shaped cross) but that different religious groups view the position as a statement about the body, about the posture of submission or suffering. The collection included depictions of Jesus without arms, which was suggested would emphasize the core suffering of humanity, something I'd never seen before. I didn't find a lot of scholarly material online about this (not easy to wade through the vast amount of information such a search calls up) but I'm interested in probing the question further. It's a new perspective for me on why these carvings look the way they do.
I walked from there to the Jardim da Cordoaria, a park nearby that has enormous sycamores that must have been pollarded over time, as their trunks are huge at the bottom and quite striking. In the park, there are 4 bronze and steel sculptures by the late Spanish artist Juan Munoz, "Thirteen Laughing at Each Other." The sculptures were the last work by the artist, who died at age 48 in 2001, not long after they were installed. They are intriguing and each one has a group of men benches, laughing, both upright and upside down.
There's a forecast for rain tomorrow, and while the sun was still shining, I wanted to get out on the Douro River for a cruise of the 6 bridges. The closest boat to my apartment was also one of the smaller ones, so I took a midday ride on the river. I liked seeing the bridges, all very different and remarkable for different feats of engineering. The bridge actually designed by Gustav Eiffel is this one below in the foreground, which you can tell is not the Dom Luis I bridge because it lacks a lower deck. The cruise was 50 minutes long and went up river a ways and down toward the Atlantic, which seemed like a fine way to soak up a little sunshine and see things from the water.
It got colder this afternoon and the sun went in, so I went to the closest restaurant to my apartment for vegetable soup and grilled fish. I'd seen the staff carrying crates of vegetables to the kitchen on my walk earlier, and sure enough, that amazing aroma of vegetable soup was coming from Adega Sao Nicolau.
I'd been up before sunrise today, painting as the sun came up looking out from my French doors. I think I will likely have a lot of studies of the Dom Luis I bridge (yesterday's was an afternoon painting) and the river by the time I leave Porto.
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