Visiting Professor of Art History Erin Giffin's new publication, Early Modern Replicas of the Holy House of Loreto: Translating Space (Routledge, 2025), is the first comprehensive, cross-cultural study of three-dimensional structural replicas of the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, constructed over the 16th through 19th centuries.
Interdisciplinary in its design, the project investigates a diversity cultures and communities engaging with Loreto, and the broad spectrum of materials used to visualize the cult, from three-dimensional structural replicas to paper prints and devotional ephemera. The resulting international Santa Casa replicas exalted the degraded surfaces of the original, countering many preconceived notions about the Catholic Church and its messaging.
Building on a growing field interest in lay devotional imagery and objects—and traversing modern national boundaries anachronistically limiting prior debate—Giffin's work examines the act of replication across Europe and Latin America. This vantage combines art historical questions of materiality and form with broader anthropological and social history concerns regarding information production, dissemination, and reception to reveal how early modern Catholics capitalized on cult replicas.
