Vision and the Veil

From: The Visual and the Visionary, Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. Jeffrey F. Hamburger 1998(Ch. 8 Vision and the Veronica)

Elaine Scarry recently observed, quoting Sartre, that "the face of a beloved friend' if imagined 'will be, by comparison with an actually present face, 'thin', 'dry', 'two-dimensional' and 'inert'". Scarry's words might work well as a description of most medieval representations of the Veronica, were it not for the fact that, at least according to visionary reports, representations of the face of Christ were anything but 'inert'. The images lent life to a face that the viewer longed to see, but had in fact never seen. The unflinching gaze of the Holy Face invited a reciprocal gaze of equal intensity: an exchange that authorised not only the object, but, by extension, empirical experience itself. Images of the Veronica contributed to a process by which vision, once cloaked in subtle distinctions between corporeal and intellectual sight intelligible only to a spiritual elite, became the standard by which all religious experience was authenticated and in which all, in turn could participate.