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Transcendent Materiality: The Santa Casa di Loreto

Sat, April 1, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Palmer House Hilton, Floor: Third Floor, Marshfield Room

Abstract

The Santa Casa di Loreto is an amalgam of object and place. The sacred site enshrines the Holy House of the Virgin, having flown miraculously from Palestine to the eastern coast of Italy in the late thirteenth century. As a site of pilgrimage, the building reenacts perpetually the Holy Spirit’s infiltration of the Virgin, offering entrance into the biblical narrative. Its surrounding marble skin, appended over the course of the sixteenth century, encapsulates the humble brick structure as a reliquary case, transforming the edifice into a sculptural installation behind the Loretan high altar. The undulating marble surface bears telltale wear wrought by generations of tactile devotion. Paradoxically, the very nature of the medium and decorative program manifest an ephemeral apparition, an object with the potential to disappear. This paper investigates how the early modern surface signals the permeable relic within, heightening the efficacy of this potent, sixteenth-century devotional edifice.

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