The Miracle of the Holy House of Loreto

In 1291 the Mamluk sultan of Egypt took Acre, the last great crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. A legend recorded in the 15th century puts another event in that same year. With Nazareth threatened by the Saracens, as Christians then called Muslim armies, angels lifted the house where the Virgin Mary had lived and carried it across the sea, until it came to rest at Loreto on Italy's Adriatic coast.

Tiepolo kept that threat in the picture. Turbaned figures watch from the rim of the oval, and dark figures of heresy and falsehood tumble out of the sky below the house, while angels heave it upward with the Virgin and Child seated on the roof. The figures shrink as they rise, so that for someone standing in the church below, the ceiling would seem to open onto the sky.

This is his final study, from 1743, for that ceiling in the Scalzi church in Venice. The fresco itself is lost, and a few fragments of it survive in the city's Gallerie dell'Accademia.