Alice E. Sanger

Abstract

In early modernity the Marian shrine of the Holy House at Loreto, or Santa Casa di Loreto, developed as a major pilgrimage site. Tradition held that, in the late 13th century, the house had been miraculously transported from the Holy Land via Dalmatia to its final resting place, a hill top in the Marches of Italy. Pilgrims journeyed to the shrine in the belief that they were encountering a sacred relic like no other – a small building that had been the birth- and dwelling-place of the Virgin Mary and the childhood home of Christ. In this extraordinary place, then, devotees might imagine holy figures at their most everyday.

At Loreto, visiting the shrine involves navigating the vast basilica built in the later 15th century to house the Holy House. The relic itself, positioned at the basilica’s crossing, is encased in an elaborate marble shell or casing constructed in the early 16th century, which is adorned with intricate relief sculptures by leading sculptors of the day. But despite its extensive decorations and trappings added over centuries, the Holy House itself is architecturally underwhelming, modest in proportions and vernacular in style. This essay examines the appeal of the shrine for early modern pilgrims, in relation to the significances of the coexistence of degraded materials, bricks and dust and spectacular adornment, to argue that the 16^th century re-housing of the relic is suggestive of the potential social subversiveness of the shrine: in sum, that the austere marble casing is designed to contain the risk that ordinary devotees might dwell too much on the everyday.

Keywords: Holy House, Virgin of Loreto, Caravaggio, relic, shrine, pilgrimage, adornment

Full text: OAJ_ISSUE 11-final_article_5

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2024s05

Biographical note

Alice E. Sanger is an associate lecturer and an honorary associate in the Department of Art History at The Open University.  A former Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome, Alice has published on the devotional practice and art patronage of the Medici grand duchesses of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and co-edited, with Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, the anthology Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Devotional Practice (Ashgate, 2012/Routledge, 2018). She is managing editor of the Open Arts Journal.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

.