The Madonna of Loreto (Madonna of the Pilgrims)
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Two pilgrims kneel with the soles of their feet turned to you, and the feet are filthy. Baglione noted them in 1642 — the muddy feet, the woman's torn and dirty cap — and recorded that the common people raised an extreme clamour over it. He meant it as a complaint. Ferdinando Bologna reads that clamour as recognition: they had seen themselves.
Loreto is the house the angels were said to have carried from Nazareth. Caravaggio paints no house and no angels — a young mother on a poor doorstep, a child in her arms who is blessing them.
Sources: Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti (Rome, 1642), Life of Caravaggio, p. 137 · Ferdinando Bologna, ‘Merisi, Michelangelo, detto il Caravaggio’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 73 (2009) · the Cavalletti chapel; a young mother on the doorpost of a poor house, two ragged pilgrims kneeling, and the offence to post-Tridentine decorum · Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672) · the Holy House at Loreto, said by ancient tradition to have been carried from Nazareth by angels
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 12,127 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.