English
Chapel of Saint Rita
Mylapore [Meliapor/São Tomé de Meliapor], Tamil Nadu, India
Religious Architecture
In the former area of the Fort of São Tomé de Mylapor, the small Chapel of Saint Rita is the only remaining testimony of the architectural complex that was the convent of the Augustines. The convent was founded in 1603 by the order’s provincial, Friar Miguel dos Anjos. Abandoned after the conquest of the city in 1663, it opened again on the return of the Portuguese authorities, but the decline of the city determined its progressive decay. It was saved by the intervention of the vicar Friar Gaspar dos Reis, who assumed the restoration of the building in 1740. Part of the original construction, the façade has a Mannerist composition of two floors separated by wide entablatures and divided vertically by Tuscan pilasters. Eighteenth-century works altered the design with the introduction of a circular frontispiece, while two odd columns that were probably part of a now-disappeared central niche remained. The interior is a simple structure with a rectangular nave separated from the chancel by a circular arch that encompasses two altars. The chancel is dominated by an retable that has a large painting of Saint Rita in the centre that is of high quality and in a good state of conservation. Two Corinthian pillars with finely fluted shafts clearly show that the retable is an adaptation of a structure from the former convent. With a central niche framed by pilasters flanked by carved wood wings, the attic of the retable emphasises the fact that it has come from somewhere else. There are some Armenian inscriptions in the chancel dating from 1729 and an eighteenth-century tabernacle of bas-relief carved wood that is very similar to one of the pulpit in the Church of Our Lady of Expectation at Monte Grande.