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

The Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, is a relic in constant motion. Legend holds that at the end of the thirteenth century, a company of angels flew Mary’s small stone house—the site of the Annunciation and Jesus’s childhood home—out of Nazareth before eventually depositing it in Loreto, a remote hill town in the Marches region of Central Italy. Over the ensuing centuries, the House prompted the movement of people to the sanctuary that grew up around it: migrant communities that had been excluded from other Italian cities came to settle in Loreto just as a growing number Christians set out on pilgrimage in order to visit the miraculous incorporation of the Holy Land into Europe. As the site grew in prominence, it attracted artists from multiple centres 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 a result of this proliferation of media, architectural reproductions of the Holy House emerged throughout Europe and as far afield as the Amazon Basin and modern-day Canada. Through contact with the original relic or one of its surrogates located across the globe, Loreto has continued to inspire devotional and artistic responses into the present day.

Drawing on the recent scholarly interest in the cult of the Holy House, this conference endeavors to serve as an important milestone for academic discourse on Loreto, bringing together scholars working in a variety of disciplines and employing diverse methodological approaches. Participants will investigate the cult of the Holy House by addressing broader themes of mobility, migration and cultural contact, conversion, colonisation, patronage, artistic and cultic reproduction, and the development and articulation of place, among others. Responding to the humanities’ recent global turn, the conference will investigate how a small town in the Italian hinterland became a central node in an expansive geographic network.

Organised by Matteo Chirumbolo (The Courtauld Institute of Art; Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut), Erin Giffin (I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and Antongiulio Sorgini (Johns Hopkins University).

Clive’s conference is kindly supported by Dr Nicholas Murray and Mr William Sharp in loving memory of Mr Clive Davies.