Chiesa della Beata Vergine di Loreto

In Tarvisio Bassa, the lower borgo of the town, a compact baroque church holds more art than its size suggests: a fully frescoed interior with a painted imitation dome, a black-robed Madonna of Loreto on the high altar, and Renaissance panels that once belonged to a winged altarpiece in the parish church up the hill.

Why it matters

Tarvisio Bassa grew as the settlement below the main town, and from the late 17th century it had this church as its own. Built for Tarvisio Bassa and linked to the Von Rechbach family, the church was damaged in an 1877 fire and rebuilt in the nineteenth century, then restored in the twentieth. Its interior brings together architecture, frescoes, sculpture and re-used Renaissance panels.

What to notice

The interior fresco cycle depicts the Assumption of Mary, with a painted imitation dome in the apse. At the centre of the high altar is a statue of the Black Madonna of Loreto holding the blessing Child. Seventeenth-century canvases hang among the frescoes. Panels from around 1520, once part of the dismantled sixteenth-century winged altarpiece of the parish church of Santi Pietro e Paolo, include scenes of the Annunciation and Visitation and figures of the Apostles; they are arranged around the organ gallery. The church also has a copy of a vision of Saint Anthony of Padua.

Context and history

The church was built in 1689 on the initiative of the Von Rechbach family. A separate account dates its assignment to the inhabitants of Tarvisio Bassa to 1688. In 1877 fire gravely damaged the church; it was rebuilt during the nineteenth century and restored again in the twentieth.

When the winged altarpiece of Santi Pietro e Paolo was dismantled, several of its early sixteenth-century painted panels were transferred here and arranged around the organ gallery. The church remains a filiale of the decanal parish of Santi Pietro e Paolo.