Title: Miracle of the Holy House

Artist: Giambattista Tiepolo

The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto 1743 Giambattista Tiepolo Italian, 1696–1770 Oil on canvas According to a fifteenth-century tradition, the Virgin Mary’s house was miraculously transported from Nazareth in the Holy Land to Loreto, a small town on Italy’s Adriatic coast, when it came under the threat of desecration by invading Saracen armies in 1291. This sketch is the artist’s final preparatory study for the large frescoed ceiling fresco, destroyed by bombing in World War I, in the church of the Scalzi in Venice.