The sanctuary of Loreto, one of Italy’s most renowned pilgrimage destinations, was
built to house the relic of the Virgin Mary’s childhood home, but many pilgrims
directed their prayers instead to the shrine’s cult image, a Marian statue with a
dark appearance. In the late sixteenth century, a time of Catholic reform, many
devotees attributed the sculpture’s color to the residue from candle smoke, despite
the fact that this departed from reformers’ strict rules of liturgical decorum. The
perception of the Virgin of Loreto’s blackened surface as simultaneously sacred
and sacrilegious returned agency to the artwork itself. The statue’s sooty accretions
suggested negligence and cried out for restoration, but they also defended the cult
of images in early modern Catholicism.
