In this informative, at times fascinating, history of one of Europe's most important pilgrimage sites, its main relic, and its devotional image, Karin Vélez takes us into a global world of exchange and journeys, artfully tying together the eastern Adriatic with western Europe, Canada, and Spanish America. The Virgin of Loreto and her holy house had a truly worldwide impact owing to various factors: her exploitation by Counter-Reformation churchmen, including those of the nascent Society of Jesus; her relationship to Catholic Europe's battle against the Ottomans; her role in an expanding tradition of pilgrimage within Europe that interacted with other forms such as the sacri monti (holy mountains) of Lombardy and southern Germanic cults (Altötting is missing here, but critical); and the extraordinary opportunity—through plans and elevations, descriptions, and illustrations—for replication, literal and otherwise, in Europe and America. This work is richly contextual and based on extensive new archival research and it is an ideal primer to a topic that will interest people involved in a wide spectrum of fields.
One of the reasons the Loreto cult is so fascinating is that it is so peculiar: its main relic, a humble building, was believed to be the holy house of Nazareth—where the Virgin raised the child Jesus—which supposedly flew away from its original location with the Mamluk conquest of the Levant in 1291, landed in Trsat in Dalmatia, and then, shortly afterward, made its final flight to Loreto in the Italian Marches. The humble structure was eventually encased in a lavish and gargantuan building designed to accommodate the ever-growing number of pilgrims. The image of the Virgin and Child which accompanied it—first a painting in the Italo-Byzantine style supposedly painted by St. Luke—was inexplicably switched with a wooden sculpture the skin tone of which gradually turned black over time, a symbol of antiquity and a reference to other black Madonnas in Europe. Both house and image were replicated all over Catholic Europe and abroad, most famously in Caravaggio's Madonna dei Pellegrini (ca. 1603–1605) but also in paintings and sculptures in central Europe, eastern Canada, New Spain, and the Moxos missions of lowland Bolivia (this study leaves out the Loreto reduction in Paraguay, another important example).
A main theme of the book is travel, and the author takes us in the footsteps of pilgrims who made particular contributions to the cult such as Ignatius of Loyola, who turned Loreto into a kind of “audition” (81) for Jesuit missionary work; Antonio Maria Gallo and Rutilio Benzoni, both cardinals under Pope Sixtus V and both authors, who established its post-Tridentine identity; Jesuits Orazio Torsellino and François Richeôme, who wrote bestsellers about the shrine (Richeôme's was a kind of virtual pilgrimage and examination of conscience); Nikolà Frankopan, a Dalmatic community leader, who promoted the cult of the Holy House's last stop at Trsat before landing in Loreto; and Pierre Chaumonot, who, after experiencing a life-altering pilgrimage at the shrine, joined the Society of Jesus and took the cult to Huronia and later Quebec City, founding the shrine/reduction of Ancienne Lorette.
One of the book's strengths is the way it avoids a top-down approach to history. Popes, cardinals, and Jesuits were involved with the shrine, but so were wayward youth, criminals, and beggars. The cult developed in a remarkably haphazard way, which humanized it and also—very likely—helped guarantee its popularity along a wide spectrum. Where the book is less convincing is its treatment of Native Americans in Canada, New Spain, and Moxos. Postcolonial critics will not be happy with her depiction of Amerindians’ willing acquiescence to the cult and to the Jesuits, and there is not enough acknowledgement of the role missionaries played in the destruction of their lifeways and in their physical displacement (in fact, the Iroquois are blamed more specifically for this than the French). Pious tales from the Jesuit letters are taken at face value as in comments like this one about Huron and Iroquois enthusiasm for the Loreto cult: “The Jesuits did not orchestrate or imagine these emotional moments. They witnessed them, and in the genuine misery of their neophytes, they saw the sermons of the Passion brought to life” (187). The present reviewer is also not convinced by Vélez's inference that Amerindians named Marie were all somehow linked to the Loreto cult: in one case the woman is actually named after Mary Magdalene, Marie Magdaleine Gachinnontée.
The author's discussion of Caravaggio's Loreto needs to consider the work of Pamela M. Jones (Altarpieces and their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni [Aldershot, 2008]), who has gone further than anyone in demonstrating how every detail in that painting relates specifically to the Loreto cult, and her choice of a Rembrandt to reflect Counter-Reformation values is baffling. One final criticism is of the overly colloquial language in the book: it is peppered with terms and expressions—such as “tweak” (248), “wagging the . . . dog” (152), “hard copy” (several usages, first on 119), “go viral” (126), “poster girl” (165), and “hit the road” (185)—which might make the book more attractive to an undergraduate audience but is jarring in a scholarly book and will quickly seem dated. The extended comparison of the Loreto cult to Wikipedia as a product of “white male English-speaking geeks (tech-savvy or Jesuit, respectively)” (248) is forced.
Nevertheless, this is a much-needed introductory study that will interest people in multiple fields—from church and art history to anthropology. The Loreto cult is indeed universal and its implications for our understanding of early modern spirituality, pilgrimage, art and architecture history, and missiology are immense.
