Cloth of St. Veronica

Bernardino Zaganelli's Cloth of Saint Veronica at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, painted around 1500 in oil on panel, depicts the miraculous image of Christ's face — the Vera Icon or true image — impressed on the cloth that the devout woman Veronica offered to Christ on his way to Calvary. The Veronica was among the most important relics in Christendom, kept in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and its devotional image — Christ's suffering face framed by the cloth — was one of the most widely reproduced sacred images of the medieval and Renaissance periods, its display at papal jubilees drawing millions of pilgrims. Zaganelli was a Romagnol painter who with his brother Francesco produced devotional panels for the churches and patrons of the eastern Romagna. The Veronica subject required the painter to depict the divine face with maximum expressiveness within the restricted format of the mandylion — the rectangular cloth — making it a concentrated exercise in spiritual portraiture. The Philadelphia Museum's holding of this work represents the transmission of this specifically Roman devotional image through the northern Italian workshop tradition.

The painting demonstrates the techniques and compositional approach characteristic of High Renaissance painting, with careful attention to the subject matter and the visual conventions of the period.