Madonna di Loreto

Caravaggio painted the Madonna di Loreto around 1605 for the Cavalletti Chapel in Sant'Agostino in Rome. The altarpiece depicts two pilgrims kneeling before the Virgin and Child who appear in the doorway of a house in a miraculous vision. Caravaggio's radical treatment made the painting immediately controversial: the Virgin is a recognizable Roman woman standing in a domestic doorway, the pilgrims are elderly, poor, and shown from behind with their dirty feet and worn clothes visible to the viewer. This deliberate humbling of the devotional image — the miracle made ordinary, the holy figures indistinguishable from their neighbors — was deeply controversial but also deeply affecting, creating an image of popular piety unprecedented in the history of Italian religious painting.

The intimate domestic setting and the startling realism of the pilgrims' worn clothes and dirty bare feet contrast with the idealized beauty of the Madonna, creating the tension between sacred and profane that defines Caravaggio's religious art.