Research

The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History, and the Multiple Geographies of the Holy House of Loreto

Matteo Chirumbolo | Associate Scholar

The Transportation of the Holy House of Loreto, 1494, Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

 

Edited by Matteo Chirumbolo, Erin C. Giffin, Antongiulio Sorgini 

This volume examines the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small brick and stone house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, in the Marche region of Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that was built to encompass it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number of Christians set out on pilgrimage to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from various places who produced opulent votive adornments in painting and sculpture. At the same time, the sanctuary became a point of transmission for devotional memorabilia, including prints, statuettes, ceramics, and tattoos. As the cult of the Holy House and its miraculous sculpture spread across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so did architectural reproductions of the building, which emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic, or with one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day. 

The volume–the first of its kind in the English language–brings together texts by twelve scholars working in a variety of disciplines to investigate how Loreto became a central node in an expansive geographic network, discussing broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact, conversion, colonization, patronage, artistic and cultic reproduction, and the development and articulation of place, among others.  

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