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Chapel of Saint John the Baptist
Ouro Preto, Vila Rica, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Religious Architecture
According to tradition, this is the oldest church in the city. The original chapel was built around 1698, high up in the Serra do Ouro Preto by the members of the expeditions of António Dias, and Father Faria held religious services there for several years. The first “arraial of Paulistas” was built around this chapel, but it was set on fire during the rebellion of 1720. The building was entirely rebuilt around 1743, when the miner Father Gabriel Mascarenhas donated lands to begin the formation of a religious heritage in the area. It is also known that the walls of the sacristy were rebuilt in 1761 at the orders of Father José dos Santos, a visiting emissary sent by the bishop of Mariana. The floor plan is quite peculiar, since the body of the nave is different from that of the chancel, with curved walls at the intersection of the two. According to Wladimir A. de Souza, the sacristy, which is built in the form of an annex to the nave, evokes a number of rural chapels in Northern Portugal. Like several other chapels of this initial period in Ouro Preto, the structure is made of stone chips mixed with canga (a spongy iron ore extracted from the surrounding mountains). It has a churchyard encircled by a wall and an extremely simple façade, typical of that period, with a single central door and two windows at the level of the choir, with wooden jambs and straight lintels, and a triangular pediment with beira-seveira eaves surmounted by a cross; the cornerstones are topped by two stone pinnacles. One original detail is the low, rather crude-looking belfry supported by the left-hand cornerstone. The interior is completely bare with no significant wood-carving. The painting at the bottom of the altarpiece depicts the twelve apostles. The historian Diogo de Vasconcelos attributed it to the same (anonymous) artist who worked on the chapel of Pompeu (in the municipality of Sabará). The chapel was remodelled several times in the second half of the 19th century. It was listed by IPHAN in 1939 and restored under its auspices in the 1950s.
Cláudia Damasceno Fonseca