The Veil of Veronica: The "True Image" and Its Doubles

During the first Christian Jubilee in 1300, pilgrims crowded into Old St Peter's in Rome to see one thing above all others: a cloth said to bear the face of Christ, impressed on it when a woman wiped his face on the way to Calvary. The poet Dante, who may have been among them, wrote of the pilgrim who comes from far away "to see our Veronica". The name was understood as vera icon, "true image". It became one of the great wonders of medieval Rome, and one of the most copied images in Europe.

The legend and the name

• Not in the Gospels. No Gospel mentions a woman wiping Jesus's face. The story grew from earlier legends. In the apocryphal Acts of Pilate a woman named Berenike/Veronica is identified with the woman healed of bleeding (Mark 5). Later tales describe a portrait of Christ that healed the emperor Tiberius. The wiping on the road to Calvary became the familiar form in the later Middle Ages and entered the Stations of the Cross.
• "Vera icon." The popular derivation of Veronica from vera icon is a medieval folk etymology. The name is really a Latin form of the Greek Berenike. The etymology is false, but its symbolism is real: the relic was venerated as the authentic image.

The Roman relic

• A cloth identified as the Veronica was venerated at St Peter's in the twelfth century. It was shown to pilgrims at the 1300 Jubilee and in later Holy Years.
• During the Sack of Rome (1527), contemporary letters report that the Veronica was stolen or destroyed. Others report that it survived. The Vatican has never declared it lost, and a relic is still kept in one of the great piers of the new St Peter's. It is shown briefly, from a distance, each year on Passion Sunday. Observers report that no image can be made out at that distance.
• In the early seventeenth century the papacy restricted reproductions of the Veronica. Some historians read that restriction as a sign that the image was no longer visible, or no longer the original. That inference is debated.

The Manoppello image

• In a Capuchin church at Manoppello in the Abruzzo hangs a thin, nearly transparent veil showing a man's face, eyes open, visible from both sides depending on the light. Local tradition says it arrived in the sixteenth century.
• In 1999 the Jesuit art historian Heinrich Pfeiffer argued that it is the original Roman Veronica, removed from St Peter's around the time of rebuilding. Claims that the veil is woven of sea-silk (byssus) and that its image is not painted have been made by supporters. Neither claim has been published in independent, peer-reviewed analysis.
• In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI visited the shrine and prayed before the image. He did not pronounce on its authenticity.

Symbology

The true image. Veronica relics answered the Byzantine tradition of images "not made by hands" (acheiropoieta), such as the Mandylion of Edessa. They offered the West its own authentic face of Christ as a pilgrimage goal. Their authority came from contact with the living Christ, which set them apart from ordinary art.

Copies that carried power. Pilgrims bought badges and painted copies of the Veronica. Prayers said before it earned indulgences. The image was multiplied so its sacredness could travel. This documented medieval economy of images runs through the whole Vault.

Connections

The Shroud of Turin (V04, often linked with the Mandylion), the Sudarium of Oviedo (V24), Byzantine icon theology (ch60) and the Reformation's attack on relic devotion (ch31).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/veil-of-veronica.html