Madonna di Loreto (Caravaggio)

Common card · No. 419475

The Madonna di Loreto or Pilgrims' Madonna is a painting created c.1604–1606 by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, located in the Cavalletti Chapel of the church of Sant'Agostino, just northeast of the Piazza Navona in Rome. It depicts the barefoot Virgin holding her naked child in a doorway before two kneeling peasants on a pilgrimage. In 1603 the heirs of marquis Ermete Cavalletti, who had died on 21 July 1602, commissioned a painting on the theme of the Madonna of Loreto to decorate a family chapel. As instructed by the marquis's will, the Cavaletti's purchased a chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome on 4 September 1603. The painter Giovanni Baglione, a competitor who had successfully ensured Caravaggio was jailed during a libel trial, said that the unveiling of this painting "caused the common people to make a great cackle (schiamazzo) over it". The uproar was not surprising. The Virgin Mary, like her admiring pilgrims, is barefoot. The doorway or niche is not an exalted...

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