Manoelino does not always show the same characteristics. Sometimes it is exuberant Gothic mixed with something else, something peculiar, and this phase seems to have grown out of a union of late Gothic and Moorish. Sometimes it is frankly naturalistic, and this seems to have been developed out of the first; and sometimes Gothic and renaissance are used together. In this phase, the composition is still always Gothic, though the details may be renaissance. At times, of course, all phases are found together, but those which most distinctly deserve the name, Manoelino, are the first and second.
The shape of the arches, whether of window or of door, is one of the most characteristic features of Manoelino. After it had been well established they were rarely pointed. Some are round, some trefoils; some have a long line of wavy curves, others a line of sharp angles and curves together.[105] In others, like the door to the Sala das Pegas at Cintra, and so probably derived from Moorish sources, the arch is made of three or more convex curves, and in others again the arch is half of a straight-sided polygon, while in many of the more elaborate all or many of these may be used together to make one complicated whole of interlacing mouldings and hanging cusps.
The capitals too are different from any that have come before. Some are round, but they are more commonly eight-sided, or have at least an eight-sided abacus, often with the sides hollow forming a star. If ornamented with leaves, the leaves do not grow out of the bell but are laid round it like a wreath. But leaf carving is not common; usually the caps are merely moulded, one or two of the mouldings being often like a rope; or branches may be set round them sometimes bound together with a broad ribbon like a bent faggot. The bases too are usually octagonal with an ogee section.
Another feature common to all phases is the use of round mouldings, either one by itself--often forming a kind of twisting broken hood-mould--or of several together, when they usually form a spiral. Such a round moulding has already been seen forming an ogee over the windows at Sempre Noiva and over the chapter-house door at São João Evangelista, Evora, and there are at Evora two windows side by side, in one of which this round moulding forms a simple ogee, while in the other it forms a series of reversed curves after the true Manoelino manner.