Transportation of the Holy House of Loreto

On 24 October 1915, in the middle of the First World War, an Austrian aircraft tried to bomb Venice's railway station and hit the church beside it, Santa Maria di Nazareth, known as the Scalzi. The blast destroyed the enormous ceiling fresco Tiepolo had painted there. This small canvas is the oil sketch he made first, the working model for that lost ceiling, so it is now one of the closest records we have of what the fresco looked like. The subject is a medieval legend. Angels are said to have carried the house of the Virgin Mary through the air from Nazareth to the town of Loreto in Italy, and Tiepolo shows it in flight, tilted through the clouds. He worked it out in 1743, more than 170 years before the bomb fell.