The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto

The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto, painted in 1743 and now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is an oil sketch ('modello') for the fresco Tiepolo was commissioned to paint on the ceiling of the church of the Scalzi (the Barefoot Carmelites) in Venice in the same year. The Santa Casa legend — that the Holy Family's house in Nazareth was miraculously transported by angels to Loreto on the Adriatic coast of Italy — was one of the most powerful pilgrimage narratives in Catholic Europe, and the Loreto shrine was among the most visited sacred sites on the Italian peninsula. Tiepolo's fresco for the Scalzi, which the Getty modello documents, was destroyed on October 24, 1915, when an Austrian artillery shell struck the nave during World War I — one of the most significant losses of Italian Baroque art in the twentieth century. The Getty's modello thus preserves the only substantial visual record of the destroyed ceiling's composition, making this small painting of extraordinary art-historical importance beyond its considerable intrinsic quality.

The composition is designed for overhead viewing, the house borne aloft by angels in a swirling, foreshortened arrangement. Tiepolo's modello technique shows his rapid, confident compositional thinking: the forms are broadly indicated rather than finished, but the spatial relationships and the celestial atmosphere are fully realised. The warm, golden light and cool sky passages establish the final fresco's colouristic programme.