ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the legend of Veronica and the sudarium as a physical object were interpreted by artists from the late Middle Ages through the Baroque period. Essentially, the subject of Veronica with the Holy Face in works of art is an image within an image, in a similar way that representations of Saint Luke painting the Virgin and some types of self-portraiture gave artists opportunities to render paintings within paintings. The iconographic study of Veronica in Early Modern art begins in the mid-thirteenth century in England with Matthew Paris, who was the first known Western chronicler to produce illuminations of the veronica relic. Suzanne Lewis, whose monograph on Matthew Paris remains the foremost study on the Chronica Majora, judged it unlikely that Matthew saw the veronica relic in person in Rome; his source was more likely textual than visual.
