Ruines de St. Thomé (Ruins of St. Thomas)

1751

Copper engraving on paper

8.3 x 5.75 in (21 x 14.5 cm)

Prévost’s 1751 Engraving of St Thomé—A Foundational Image of Early Christian Archaeology on the Coromandel Coast

This 1751 engraved view of the ruins of St Thomé (Mylapore), published in Antoine Prévost’s Histoire Générale des Voyages - constitutes a seminal European representation of one of South Asia’s most symbolically charged Christian landscapes. The site—traditionally associated with the martyrdom of St Thomas the Apostle—held deep significance for Portuguese, Jesuit, and later British authorities, embodying the convergence of apostolic legend, local religious memory, and global missionary ambition along the Coromandel Coast.

The engraving depicts St Thomas Mount, also known as Parangi Malai or the Mount of the Apostle Thomas, long believed to be the place where St Thomas spent time during his missionary journey to India in the first century AD. For early modern European audiences, such locations affirmed the narrative of an apostolic Christianity rooted in Asia itself, offering devotional geography as historical proof. The ruined church atop the mount, chapel foundations, and adjoining settlement are rendered as relics of sacred antiquity, anchoring Mylapore as a locus of Christian origin in the East.

Prévost’s plate was informed by earlier Portuguese and Jesuit drawings circulated from the seventeenth century, reflecting a Lusitanian understanding of St Thomé as a spiritual frontier. A Portuguese oratory was established on the hill as early as 1523, later developing into the revered shrine complex that culminated in the sixteenth-century church built by the Portuguese—today known as the St Thomas Mount National Shrine and associated with the Syro-Malabar Catholic tradition. Its colonial-era architecture, ornate decoration, and enduring pilgrimage status underscore the continuity of European Christian presence at the site.

The engraving must also be read within the intellectual climate of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, where travel literature blended ethnography, archaeology, and missionary knowledge into encyclopaedic forms. Prévost’s Voyages provided one of the most ambitious compilations of global information, and engravings such as this helped standardise continental imagery of distant sacred landscapes.

Produced before the consolidation of British dominance at Madras, the plate also reflects the contested religious and imperial terrain of the region, where Portuguese ecclesiastical authority and emerging British power competed over symbolic sites of Christian antiquity. Its importance for collectors lies not only in its rarity but also in its documentary value: it preserves a visual record of St Thomé before nineteenth-century rebuilding and modern urban encroachment, capturing a moment when the mount remained a quiet devotional landmark above the fishing communities and coastal villages of historic Mylapore.

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