First Authors

This chapter reexamines Loreto's historical “brand” by looking at some of the first authors of Loreto's origin story. It opens with the architects of Loreto's shrine seal, Cardinal Antonio Maria Gallo and Cardinal Rutilio Benzoni. Moving down the ranks and back in time, there are two earlier sixteenth-century chroniclers who laid the groundwork for the high clergy's selective mythohistory: a shrine governor, Pietro di Giorgio Tolomei, and a local secretary, Girolamo Angelitta. Like Virgin and house, and seal and medal, these men are first introduced in pairs and then grouped in larger company because, sometimes unbeknownst to each other, they worked in tandem to reconstruct Loreto's past. Their overlaps and contradictions illuminate the often inadvertently collaborative project of building official shrine history.