3-035-560 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto, 1743. Additional Info: Giambattista Tiepolo made this final preparatory study for a large illusionistic fresco that covered the ceiling of the Scalzi church in Venice. The fresco was destroyed by bombing in World War I. According to a fifteenth-century legend, when the Virgin Mary's house in Nazareth came under threat by invading Saracen armies, it was miraculously transported in 1291 from the Holy Land to Loreto, a small town on Italy's Adriatic coast.