ITALIAN, 17TH CENTURY

The legend of Our Lady of Loreto relates that the 'Santa Casa' - the house at Nazareth in which Mary had been born and brought up, the same to which the angel of the Annunciation came, and Mary had lived in during the childhood of Christ - was carried away to safety by angels in 1291 when the house was threatened by the incoming Saracens. The angels first bore it to a place on the coast of Dalmatia, but its final resting place was Loreto, a town near Ancona in the Italian Marches. By the late 16th century this story was used by the Jesuits to promote the town as a centre of pilgrimage, and the present image of the Virgin and Child seated on the roof of the house would have been made in this tradition.