Italienisch

The depiction of the Vera Icon, the True Face of Christ, is one of the most profound and widespread devotional motifs in Western Christianity. It is rooted in the legend of St Veronica, who handed Christ a sweat cloth on the Way of the Cross, into which his face was miraculously imprinted. As an acheiropoieton - an image not made by human hands - it attained the highest cultic veneration. The thorn-crowned head of Christ can vary greatly in expression: from the humanly suffering Man of Sorrows to the divinely tolerant Saviour. The depiction was probably inspired by Claude Mellan's famous engraving from 1649, in which the face of Christ is formed from a single, rhythmically rising and falling spiral line.