Overview

The Veil of Veronica is a cloth venerated as bearing the true image of the face of Christ, impressed upon it, according to legend, when a woman wiped his brow as he carried the cross to Golgotha. Her name, Veronica, itself echoes the Latin phrase vera icon, "true image," which suggests that the person grew from the relic rather than the reverse. In the Middle Ages the Veronica was one of the supreme goals of pilgrimage to Rome; copies of the Holy Face called vernicles were carried away by pilgrims and the image shaped Western depictions of Christ. It is enshrined in the great pier of St Veronica at St Peter's Basilica, one of four piers that carry the dome, and it is exposed to the faithful only briefly each year. Its story places it among the acheiropoieta, images believed to be of miraculous rather than human making.

No canonical Gospel mentions a woman named Veronica or a miraculous facial image on cloth; the legend descends instead from later apocryphal literature associated with the Acts of Pilate tradition, developing further in medieval texts from roughly the eleventh through fourteenth centuries that fused a figure called Veronica with the Latin phrase vera icon, true image, a likely linguistic conflation in which the name and the phrase describing the relic's supposed nature merged into one legendary person rather than the name simply belonging to a historical individual who happened to own such a cloth.