“The relocation of the house of Maria from Nazareth to Loreto,” Tiepolo – overview of the painting 
- Posted by Tiepolo
- Museum: Academy Gallery
- Year: Around 1743
Overview of the painting :
Transferring Maria’s house from Nazareth to Loreto – Giovanni Balista Tiepolo. Oil on canvas. 126 x 86
“The relocation of Maria’s house from Nazareth to Loreto” by Giovanni Balista Tiepolo is one of two fresco sketches for the Venetian church of Santa Maria of Nazareth. The second is stored at the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The mural itself was destroyed in 1915 during the shelling of the temple by the Austrians.
The complexity of the work was that the artist needed to fit the drawing into a narrow oval space between the paintings of the Mangozza Colonna, the famous square player (squadraturists are artists who performed picturesque architectural compositions on the plane by picturesque means). Creating the effect of the vertical depth of the sky, Tjepolo breaks the image into registers, emphasizing the density of the characters in the lower and maximally highlighting, visually facilitating the upper plan with a barely intended exquisite graphics. According to legend, St. Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, erected a church over the house of Maria in Nazareth, where Gabriel appeared to the young Virgin with divine news. At the end of the XIII century, when the Turkish threat arose, the three walls of the building were moved to the town of Loreto in papal possession by members of the Angel family who ruled Epirus, under whose protectorate Nazareth was located. The legend “adapted” the name of the rulers and reports that the angels moved the house and lowered it into the laurel grove of the town in the north of the Adriatic.