This article was originally featured in the Spring 2026 issue of the NOMA Magazine. To access future issues, become a NOMA member today.
In 1970, NOMA acquired a monumental canvas depicting a lavishly dressed, dark-skinned Madonna and Child from a London gallerist. At this time, the city of New Orleans was branding itself the “Gateway to the Americas,” and NOMA’s collecting strategy followed suit. The painting, titled Our Lady of Lima, was acquired as part of a museum initiative to collect art of the Americas in recognition of Louisiana’s shared historical French and Spanish colonial history.
Monumental paintings of statues of the Virgin Mary were commonly produced in Italy and Spain during the 17th century, and such works were then reproduced profusely across Peru by Peruvian Indigenous and Mestizo artists into the 18th century. Known among Quechua-speaking Peruvians as mamachas (referring to Inca Earth Mother, Pachamama), paintings depicting the Virgin Mary as the patroness of towns including Copacabana, Cocharcas, and Guápulo became one of the most recognizable pictorial themes in Peruvian viceregal painting.
The obscure iconography and remarkable technique of Our Lady of Lima were long understood by art historians as characteristic of artistic styles that emerged in Peru’s viceregal capital in the 17th and 18th centuries. Though the painting’s dramatic chiaroscuro and the Virgin’s deep complexion are more naturalistic than other paintings produced in Lima during the same period, many works of this era were destroyed in two major earthquakes recorded in the years 1687 and 1746. Thus, the painting’s Peruvian attribution went unquestioned for decades, and the work was featured in several academic publications linked to international exhibitions of viceregal painting.
Recent publications by Italian art historians Chiara Marin (2013) and Maria Giulia Aurigemma (2014) document a virtually identical painting to NOMA’s 1970 acquisition–not in Peru, but in the sacristy of the Church of San Bernardo alle Terme in Rome, built in 1598. Both scholars identified the Italian painting’s subject as Our Lady of Loreto, based on a wooden statue of Mary (carved from an olive tree by St. Luke, according to Catholic tradition) that is venerated in the House of Loreto, which is believed to have been Mary’s historical residence in Nazareth. The walls were retrieved from the Holy Land and brought to Italy in the late-13th century, becoming an important pilgrimage site. Though the work slightly differs from the painting at NOMA in the arrangement of the gold necklaces adorning the icon, the distinct similarities between the two works called the Peruvian origins of NOMA’s acquisition into question.
Both Marin and Aurigemma identified the statue of Our Lady of Loreto as a recurrent pictorial theme of the Rome-based Venetian artist Carlo Saraceni (c. 1579-1620). Saraceni came from a well-connected family of wealthy silk merchants, and his acquaintance with artists and patrons may have facilitated his success in Rome. Most of Saraceni’s work from his time in the city, including various representations of this Marian patronage wearing different gowns, can be dated between 1600 and 1610. For example, a smaller depiction of Our Lady of Loreto painted on glass and attributed to the artist was inventoried among the belongings of Saraceni’s widow, Grazia Luna, in 1622. Marin and Aurigemma’s collective research eventually led to the reattribution of NOMA’s Our Lady of Lima to Saraceni, and to the subsequent renaming of the work to Our Lady of Loreto.
The correct identification of Our Lady of Loreto strengthens NOMA’s Italian baroque collection holdings without stripping the painting of its relevance as a visual source for Peruvian viceregal painting. Saraceni’s iconic composition of Our Lady of Loreto was referenced on an engraving that Jesuit priests commissioned from the Flemish engraver Hieronymous Wierix in 1605. This engraving circulated throughout the Spanish and Portuguese missions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, establishing a universal canon of devotional Marian effigies from the Andes to the Philippines and becoming one of the earliest recorded instances of the globalization of art.
-Orlando Hernández Ying, Lapis Curator of Art of the Americas