Images of the face of Christ on cloth are recorded at Rome from the early medieval centuries, and by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Veronica was firmly established at Old St Peter's, promoted in Jubilee years as a relic that drew crowds across Europe. Popes granted indulgences for its veneration, and its likeness spread through pilgrim badges and painted copies. When the old basilica was demolished and rebuilt between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the relic's original chapel was dismantled; the historian Heinrich Pfeiffer has argued that in this upheaval, around 1608, the true veil left the basilica and reappeared as the Volto Santo of Manoppello in the Abruzzo mountains. The Vatican has offered no confirmation, and officially the Veronica is still kept in the pier that bears its name, brought out for a short exposition on the fifth Sunday of Lent.
No single surviving cloth commands consensus as the authentic Veil: candidate images are separately venerated in Rome, at St Peter's Basilica, where the relic has been kept since at least the eighth century according to some traditions though its public display was severely restricted after the Sack of Rome in 1527; at Manoppello, Italy, where a distinct image known as the Volto Santo has attracted its own independent following since the seventeenth century; and at Jaen, Spain, where the Santo Rostro is venerated under a still separate provenance tradition. Each cloth has its own independent, disputed history, and this atlas records the existence of multiple rival claimants as itself part of the honest account of the relic's status, rather than treating any single one as the authentic original.