Introduction: Relics and Remains

Depicted in this compelling early eighteenth-century print (Fig. According to the tradition that has crystallized around it over two millennia, the vernicle is the cloth with which a pious Jerusalem woman compassionately dried the face of the suffering Christ on the road to his crucifixion at Calvary, and upon which his visage was miraculously imprinted in photographic facsimile. Some versions of the welter of legend now surrounding it tell how this hallowed item was carried to Rome and presented to the Emperor Tiberius, whom it is said to have cured. Endorsed with indulgences and exposed for public veneration by the papacy, it was popularized in pen and paint by authors and artists in the later Middle Ages. Devotion to the relic survived Fig. 1.