ABSTRACT
Veronica and her image-bearing cloth gave tangible form to the visage of Christ, which helped to satiate worshippers’ desires to meet the gaze of their maker and redeemer. Ultimately, the veronica advanced heated conversations about what was seeable or unseeable, knowable or unknowable. Veronica and her cloth signified the spiritual presence of Christ despite his physical absence. The Franciscans capitalized on these overlapping themes and converging circumstances – literary, material, topographical, theological, social, and artistic – by inserting a woman, Veronica with her veil, into the Via Crucis. In doing so, the friars both adapted the legend and intervened in the urban centers of Jerusalem and Western European cities in order to elicit compassion from those whom they sought to evangelize. Veronica, as a symbol of the relic of the living Christ, offered a promise of the Resurrection to Christians in Europe and Jerusalem.
