Chapter I Saving Face (28 - 83)

CHAPTER ONE
SAVING FACE
THE VERONICA AND THE VISIO DEI
Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ,

these souls have seen and see the divine essence with an
intuitive vision and even face to face, without the medi-
ation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather
the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them,
plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy
the divine essence. Moreover, by this vision and enjoy-
ment the souls of those who have already died are truly
blessed and have eternal life and rest. Also the souls of
those who will die in the future will see the same divine
essence and will enjoy it before the general judgment.
Pope Benedict XII, 13361
Longing for a face-to-face encounter with God runs deep; even today, sci-
entists are recruited to authenticate the image on the Shroud of Turin or
to reconstruct the physiognomy of a skull from Jerusalem dating to the
time of Jesus.2 Attempts to represent in words or pictures a true image of
Jesus are not idle speculation; the salviic power of a face-to-face encounter
with Christ is evident in Scripture. Paul wrote, “For God . . . hath shined in
our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the
face of Christ Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:6),3 and, as mentioned in my intro-
duction, “We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to
face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Psalms also engage with this theme; for
example, “The light of thy countenance O Lord is signed upon us” (Psalm
4:7), and “Thy face, O Lord, will I still seek” (Psalm 26:8). Yet, for most of
the medieval period, Christians in western Europe showed little interest in
what the living Jesus looked like, in terms of his speciic bodily and facial
appearance, focusing on other aspects of Christology more invested in his
divine essence.4 This changed in the thirteenth century, and was to have
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28 VISION, DEVOTION, SELFREPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL ART
profound implications for theology, politics, and practices of devotion in

the fourteenth. It also spurred an interest in the depicted gaze inseparable
from the relexive depictions of book owners that concern me in the chap-
ters that follow.
Although the face of Christ had long been of interest in the Byzantine
world, it was not until the thirteenth century that western Europe saw
an explosion of efforts to make visible, through words and pictures, the
true image of God’s incarnate visage. This project was in many senses one
of translation, both as we understand it now and as it was understood in
the period. Jesus, as both man and God, was the original text. Fidelity
to this model was at least ostensibly of importance: the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic proliferation of objects said to
have captured Jesus’s likeness by touch, such as the Shroud of Turin, or
forged documents claiming to speak in the voice of an eyewitness to the
appearance of Jesus, such as the “Lentulus letter.”5 Furthermore, because
western accounts, both verbal and visual, of the visible face of God adhere
closely to earlier Byzantine models, it is safe to say that a literal pro-
cess of translation, in the modern sense, has taken place. The Lentulus
letter more or less reproduces in Latin the text of a Greek icon paint-
ers’ manual regarding the treatment of the face of Christ.6 But transla-
tion introduces variance, as Walter Benjamin observed: “No translation
would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the
original. For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not
a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original under-
goes a change.”7 Although Benjamin was thinking of literary translation,
pictorial translations also transform their sources, setting aside culturally
irrelevant or incomprehensible meanings and reframing the picture both
literally (for example, inserting it into a new physical container or spa-
tial context) and iguratively (as is the case when new verbal texts attach
themselves to an image, or new ritual practices inform the way it is viewed
and used).
This chapter is concerned with the variety of ways in which western
European audiences, once offered the possibility of a true image of the
face of Christ, adapted it to existing devotional habits while at the same
time transforming these habits to accommodate an increasingly visual
conception of the relationship between individuals and the sacred.8 The
Eucharistic connotations of the Holy Face were developed in a climate in
which, as Aden Kumler has pointed out, the laity were particularly primed
for and receptive to the spectacle of the elevation of the Host, and were
ready to incorporate Eucharistic elements into their own devotional per-
formances.9 In this period, elite laypeople increasingly structured their
devotion around a nexus of visual images and translated texts that gave
SAVING FACE: THE VERONICA AND THE VISIO DEI 29
them access to the formal liturgy of the Church, which for over a thousand
years had been relatively off-limits to them.10 In its emphasis on the uneasy
relationship between representation and spiritual vision, a paradox encap-
sulated in the visible invisibility of the Host, the picturing of Christ’s face
sheds light on the development of the relexive image of the book owner
in books of devotion.11 Jeffrey Hamburger’s eloquent essay “Vision and the
Veronica” explored devotional uses of the the face of Christ from the mid-
thirteenth to the late ifteenth century, speciically in the context of female
mysticism and the visual culture of late medieval conventual life.12 The par-
ticularly feminine associations of devotion to the face of Christ correlate
with the predominantly female or feminized audiences for the lay Psalters
and Books of Hours that constituted the proving ground for thirteenth-
and early fourteenth-century experiments in relexive imagery as well.
Furthermore, in his analysis of the writings of such mystics as Gertrude of
Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn, Hamburger observed that the women
employed the face of Christ “as a pretext to explore Christian theories of
representation, in particular, as expressed by the closely related concepts
of imago and imitatio, image and imitation.”13 Likewise, depictions of book
owners at prayer, in their relexive quality, propose inventive visual com-
mentaries on the nature of representation, image, and imitation and their
role in Christian worship.
The connection between the growing interest in the true face of Christ
and the emergence of the relexive image of the book owner as a distinct
representational practice is more than chronologically coincidental; inno-
vative approaches to picturing both the face of Christ and the body of the
book owner appear in the same types of manuscripts and often in the very
same manuscripts, produced in a relatively restricted geographic region,
and intended for a small segment of society. In this chapter, I argue that
in the west, the thirteenth-century’s negotiation of the image of Christ’s
face did far more than establish a canonical set of iconographic expecta-
tions about his physical appearance; it radically redeined the character of
pictorial representation and opened previously unthinkable avenues for
artistic exploration. One of these avenues led toward mimetic portraiture;
the concern for visual accuracy in the facsimile of the divine visage privi-
leged physiognomic form to an unprecedented degree, and contributed in
particular to the notion of the artistic self-portrait, as Joseph Koerner has
shown with reference to Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung.14 But another
avenue – and the one that concerns me in this book – opened the way to a
reconsideration of the role of material images and corporeal vision in the
context of devotion. The relexive image of the book owner, in relation to
the face of Christ, becomes a pictorial essay that seeks to make visible the
power of the devotional gaze and involve its depicted subject, who is also
its intended viewer, in a reciprocal, transformational, and dizzying visual

encounter with the divine.
Western engagement with the Holy Face (a term used to denote both
the idea of Christ’s true image and material representations thereof)
undoubtedly grew out of diverse practices, phenomena, and points of con-
tact with Eastern traditions. Yet, inasmuch as any historical phenomenon
can be said to have an originary moment, the late medieval mania for the
Holy Face has a clear moment of ignition. In 1208, Pope Innocent III
instituted the annual procession of an object known as the Veronica, which
had resided in St. Peter’s Basilica since Carolingian times.15 This object,
purportedly an acheiropoieton of the face of Christ, a miraculously generated
image not made by human craft, was to become one of the most popular
magnets for pilgrims to Rome over the course of the thirteenth century,
perhaps even spurring the inauguration of the Papal Jubilee by Boniface
VIII in 1300.16 The irst part of this chapter explores the emergence of
interest in the Veronica as an authentic image of Christ and looks at the
earliest well-documented artistic response to it, in mid-thirteenth-century
England. The second part of the chapter engages with the proliferation
of visual representations of the Holy Face between 1230 and about 1330,
especially in the context of illuminated books. The inal section begins with
an account of the outburst of controversy in the 1330s over the question of
the Visio Dei, or the beatiic vision, and then considers its implications for
representations of the Holy Face and for the governing metaphors of the
Holy Face – the seal and the mirror. The notion of a self transformed and
relected through visual devotion lies at the heart of my understanding of
the representational and performative goals of the depiction of the book
owner within the book. It is in the growth of visual attention to the Holy
Face that I see the formulation of a kind of ad hoc theory of the image that
allows the image of the owner to reach for these goals.
The Veronica and Matthew Paris
Bodies suffering, yearning, and perceiving are present from the inception
of the procession of the Veronica in 1208. This ritual, held on the feast
day of the Wedding at Cana (the second Sunday after Epiphany), took the
Veronica from its usual place in a chapel at the west end of Saint Peter’s,
down through the streets of Rome, and inally to the Ospedale Santo
Spirito in Sassia.17 Although the hospital dated to the pre-Carolingian era,
Innocent himself had been involved in the rebuilding of the institution and
in turning it over to the Order of the Holy Spirit, a new monastic order
founded by Gui de Montpellier that had as its objective the care of the
poor, the sick, orphans, abandoned children, and pilgrims.18 Right away,
then, the Veronica’s mission was implicitly thaumaturgic, in keeping with
traditions associated with the object from its earliest appearance in the his-
torical record. An eighth-century source relates that the emperor Tiberius,
suffering from a serious illness, sent for Jesus, only to discover too late that
he had been cruciied; fortunately for Tiberius, a woman named Veronica
(associated in the source with the woman cured of a hemorrhage in Matthew
9:20–22) had a miraculous likeness of Christ impressed on a cloth by his
living face, which, transmitted to Tiberius, healed him.19 Only later would
the cloth be associated with the sudarium of the Passion, the cloth on which
Christ’s sweat and blood left their traces along the via Crucis.20 Yet there is
more to the Veronica’s visit to the sick than the simple hope that its power
as a contact relic of Christ would effect healing on the patients at Santo
Spirito. In his letter announcing the institution of the procession, Innocent
presented this rationale: “Jesus and his disciples went as guests to the wed-
ding at Cana in Galilee . . . and for that reason, most sensibly, we institute
that the image of Jesus Christ be carried down from the basilica of blessed
Peter by the canons to the said hospital.”21
Thus, the Veronica, in making the journey from Saint Peter’s to Santo
Spirito, performs its identity with Christ, reenacting his appearance at Cana
before the wedding guests, who were understood by medieval exegetes to
igure the human “body” of the Church.22 Gerhard Wolf has pointed out
that Innocent expressly understood the visual encounter with the Veronica
as a marriage between the soul and God, preiguring the beatiic vision.23
Furthermore, Innocent speciied that attendant on the annual procession
and ostentation of the Veronica would be a massive act of papal charity
in imitation of Jesus’s miraculous transformation of water into wine: one
thousand paupers and three hundred residents of the hospital would each
receive “three denari, one for bread, another for wine, and another for
meat.”24 That Innocent framed the ostentation of the Veronica as a perfor-
mance of Caritas is an inescapable conclusion, considering that elsewhere
he explicitly allegorized the Cana narrative in terms of the transformation
of mere mercy into the higher virtue of charity.25 Furthermore, the feeding
of the multitudes made visible (and for the 1,300 beneiciaries, edible and
tangible) Innocent’s message of the identity between Christ and his vicar,
and also between Christ and the Veronica. On another level perhaps best
appreciated by the clergy, it also acted out the notion of the Church as
offering sustenance through the sacrament of the Eucharist.
At the heart of this effort to make plain to the physical senses the iden-
tity and numen of the Veronica, however, is an absence. The Veronica
itself (that is, the object of uncertain origins and description that Innocent
put forward as the centerpiece of the ritual) was by and large invisible, by
all accounts. When in its usual place in Saint Peter’s, it was enclosed in
a ciborium commissioned by Pope Celestine III in the late twelfth cen-
tury that screened it almost entirely from view behind doors of inely cut
bronze.26 Innocent commissioned for the procession an ostensory in which
the Veronica traveled: “a case of gold and silver with precious gems, made
especially to carry it reverently.”27 But of the visible nature of the object
so contained, one learns nothing from this account. Perhaps the ostensory
resembled the silver-gilt case that was also commissioned by Innocent III
to enclose the Christ Emmanuel icon of the Sancta Sanctorum around the
same time, a frame that almost effaces the image it encloses. Describing the
Veronica itself, Innocent employed the term efigies – a speciically Latinate
formulation that avoids the theological baggage of such Greek-derived
terms as acheropsita (a Latinization of acheiropoeton) or iconam (icon – in its
Eastern sense).28 The vagueness of the designation also sidesteps the prob-
lem of what exactly the Veronica was and how it looked.
Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia, composed between 1214 and
1218, described the Veronica thus: “This Veronica is a true physical picture
of the Lord represented as an efigy from the chest upwards.” Gervase also
mentioned that it was customarily covered with a veil, which may come as
close to an eyewitness account as exists.29 Such visual access to the object as
Gervase’s description implies was unusual. According to Gerald of Wales,
who visited Rome several times between 1198 and 1203, the object itself
was an iconam rather than more simply an efigies, indeed “a true icon, that
is to say, a true image,” but not readily visible: “Nobody can examine it
except through a veil that hangs in front of it.”30 In other words, the appa-
rition of the image of the true face was always deferred, or at least partially
screened, from the believer in a kind of iteration of the view of its arche-
type, seen “but in a dark manner” in this life, in the Pauline formulation.
The very darkness of Christ’s face in the Veronica – a darkness suggested
both by copies and by contemporary written sources – corresponded to
and underscored its visible invisibility, as Herbert Kessler has argued in
an essay concerned with the iconographic tradition of the Holy Face in
western Europe.31 What Innocent in fact made visible was not so much the
Veronica itself as Rome’s ownership of the Veronica, and the theological
implications of the object.32
While Innocent’s project was closely tied to the articulation of the
supremacy of Rome and its pontiff, he seems to have inadvertently given
impetus to the idea of a true image of the Holy Face at a moment partic-
ularly receptive to images that could be understood both as unique (e.g.,
a self-generating likeness of Christ) and ininitely reproducible within the
contemplative frame of devotion.33 Writing of imported – and purported –
Byzantine icons that circulated in western Europe in the later Middle Ages,
Hans Belting observed that such icons had a greater impact in terms of the
concepts they helped to articulate – such as a veridical, originary image of
Christ – than their material and artistic nature as discrete objects.34 The
authority of the singular object was always in play against the universal
truths it claimed to represent. This is evident in the widespread practice
of restoring or entirely remaking venerable, but decrepit or damaged, cult
igures: the remaking or replacement could even “improve” on the object
being replaced or restored in terms of contemporary taste. This is probably
the case with the replacement of the Madonna degli Occhi Grossi on the choir
altar of the Cathedral of Siena with the updated Madonna del Voto of Guido
da Siena shortly after the Sienese triumph at Montaperti in 1260.35 The
reuse of twelfth-century glass panels of the enthroned Virgin in a num-
ber of Gothic cathedrals in France literally reframed the venerable older
images with updated motifs, forms, and imagery.36 Into this fertile environ-
ment came the Veronica, a cult image the very visibility of which was made
a fetish by the circumlocutions of its presentation.
Gerhard Wolf characterizes the Veronica as presented by Innocent III as
ripe for “mediatisation” – that is, distancing from its material and unique
source through openly technological processes of reproduction.37 In this
context, the idea of the Veronica trumps the singular object. In its inherent
multiplicity, the Veronica was very similar to the Byzantine Mandylion.
This object, which resided in the Pharos chapel of the Bucoleon Palace in
Constantinople until the early thirteenth century, was likewise thought to
be an acheiropoeton.38 Its legend traced its origin to King Abgar of Edessa,
to whom it had been given by the apostle Thaddeus in lieu of an in-person
visit from Christ. Different versions of the story account for the genera-
tion of the image differently, but like the Veronica, by the Middle Ages it
was essentially thought to be a direct impression of the face of Christ. This
image, which lay hidden for many centuries according to later accounts,
was miraculously rediscovered in 544 and saved the city from a Persian
siege. Four hundred years later, with the city under Muslim control, the
Mandylion again saved the city from a siege, this time by the Christian
Byzantines. It was exchanged for four hundred Muslim captives and taken
to Constantinople, where it remained until sometime after the Latin con-
quest of 1204. Its subsequent fate is a little unclear, but it was likely one
of the objects purchased by Louis IX of France from the Latin Emperor
Baldwin II’s Venetian pawnbrokers, and ceded to Louis by Baldwin in a
Golden Bull of 1247.39 The Mandylion’s importance as a singular object
was always complemented by its status as an imprint, or seal, of Christ –
from its earliest appearance in the literature as an image (around the begin-
ning of the seventh century), it had the capacity to generate copies of itself
by contact.40 After its arrival in post-Iconoclastic Constantinople, it also
became a model for icon painters, generating one of the standard icon
types that remain in production to this day in Orthodox circles.41
Mandylion icons circulated widely in the East, and were a popular type
in Slavic lands to the north and west of the shrinking Byzantine Empire –
we’ll encounter one important example shortly. Icons also had a presence
in western Europe, having participated in the competitive jockeying for
prestige and power between Constantinople and Rome from early times,
and traveling as gifts or tokens in the complicated relations between
Byzantium and other Orthodox states and western European powers.
Western engagement with the East during the Crusades stimulated artistic
exchange, or at least the partial western absorption of the icon-painters’
traditions.42 In the wake of the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders
in 1204, Venetian opportunism and Frankish hunger for the rich horde of
relics and sacred images uncovered in the imperial palaces and churches of
the city led to the dispersal of many of these objects to western church trea-
suries and to royal and imperial chapels.43 Reliquaries, with their sumptu-
ous enamels, gold, and jewels, were the most sought-after items, perhaps
partly because they corresponded to similar reliquaries already familiar in
Latin Christianity. But other sacred objects, including panel icons, were
also of interest.44 Hugh of St. Victor’s allusion to “bust-length pictures that
the Greeks commonly call ‘icons’” in his description of the depiction of the
Old Testament Patriarchs in his Mystical Ark, an encyclopedic pictorial
diagram of theological truths, gives a clear sense of the western European
perception of these images as especially authoritative and appropriate for
devout contemplation.45
Hugh may have been familiar with authentically Greek icons, and Latins
who traveled to or lived in the Crusader states would have encountered
Byzantine and Syrian icons in situ and perhaps come to appreciate to some
degree their liturgical function. However, most people in the Latin west
encountered Byzantine art secondhand if at all. A number of surviving
drawings or collections of drawings from the thirteenth century, including
the Venetian Wolfenbüttel Musterbuch and a leaf with two drawings now
in Freiburg, testify to one means by which Byzantine motifs and modes
circulated.46 In terms of more inished works, the lourishing hybrid visual
culture of such eastern Mediterranean centers as Acre and Cyprus brought
together French, Italian, and Byzantine points of view, transforming the
traditional icon types of the Orthodox world in the process. This contact
came through multiple channels and was mediated in various ways, all of
which were highly purposeful on the part of artists and patrons. Jaroslav
Folda argues, particularly, that the explosion of what has been described
since Vasari as the maniera greca in central Italy in the thirteenth century
was in fact part and parcel of this mediated Franco-Italo-Byzantine visual
3. Sainte Face,
icon of the Holy
Face, late twelfth
century, Serbian
(Laon, Cathedral
Treasury). Photo
Gianni Dagli
Orti / The
Art Archive at
Art Resource,
New York
tradition as opposed to a straightforward western European response to

the undiluted Byzantine mainstream.47
It is dificult to say exactly how common direct encounters with speciic
types of icons would have been, but as Hans Belting’s survey of the evidence
from the twelfth to ifteenth centuries in Italy indicates, a variety of icons
did circulate and in circulating engendered copies and counterfeits that
suggest the esteem in which they were held.48 Although the vast majority
of the surviving examples of icons that found their way west depict the
Madonna, icons of Christ were also available, and at least one Mandylion
icon that surfaced in Rome is known.49 The fate of this example, the so-
called Sainte Face of Laon (Figure 3), demonstrates the western European
receptivity to reproductions of “authentic” images of the true face of God.
It is important to note that although Rome (and Italy more generally) was
home to a signiicant number of icons, some of which had resided there

since late antiquity and some of which were introduced in the course of the
early and high Middle Ages, such objects were little known outside of Italy
and thus would have made a huge impression when they did make their
way north. The Sainte Face, which arrived in Rome not as a direct result of
the Crusades but rather more indirectly as the result of the kind of politi-
cal negotiations with eastern Europe necessitated by the geopolitics of the
Crusades, gives a sense of how deep an impact an eastern icon could have
in thirteenth-century France.
Sometime around 1249, the increasing fame of the Veronica inspired
Sibylle, the abbess of the Cistercian house of Montreuil-les-Dames, out-
side of Laon, in Picardy, to write to her brother, Jacques Pantaléon, papal
chancellor and future Pope Urban IV (r. 1261–1264), requesting an image
of the Holy Face for herself and her nuns. He obliged by sending her the
object that would later become known as the Sainte Face. This was in fact
a Serbian icon of the Mandylion, probably dating to the second half of the
twelfth century, which had perhaps been transported to Rome as a gift to
the See of Saint Peter by one of the two diplomatic missions of the Serbian
king (kral) Stephen Prvovenčani, which took place in 1200 and 1217.50
This would explain how it came into the hands of a man intimately con-
nected with both the pope and his treasury. There is a tendency in schol-
arship on the Holy Face to imply that the abbess audaciously asked her
brother to send her the Veronica itself, but I think this a mistaken reading.51
Philological issues surrounding the documentary evidence of her request
cloud the picture, but assuming that the seventeenth-century copy of the
letter Jacques wrote his sister is more or less accurate,52 I would suggest
that she did not expect him to remove such a powerful and so profoundly
Roman object from its home – the often dire consequences of moving a
holy object against its will were well known.53 Instead, she would seem to
have been sophisticated enough as a consumer of images to understand
that copies of such an object would be inevitable, and if not exactly com-
monplace, available to her powerful and well-placed brother. The picture
he sent her he describes as a “sanctam Faciem,” and it is only farther along
in his letter that he enjoins his sister: “Having received it, pray earnestly
and with proper reverence towards this thing which represents, as the Holy
Veronica itself, the true image and likeness; treat it piously, gently, and
with care, so that you will have the best contemplation of it.”54 This, along
with the stated intention of the picture, namely, “that through contempla-
tion it more greatly inlame your devout feelings and render your thoughts
more pure,”55 suggests that Sybille’s interest in the Holy Face was not so
much in the relic-like, thaumaturgic qualities associated with the Roman
Veronica but in the devotional, contemplative function of the image more
generally – something that would not have been available to the Roman
pilgrim clamoring for a glimpse of the Veronica through its various visual
impediments.
The icon Jacques Pantaléon sent to his sister did not vanish into Sybille’s
convent to function as a focus of contemplative prayer alone: instead, it was
to become one of the most venerated holy images in its region, credited
with miracle-working properties equivalent to those of the Veronica. In
1262, the Sainte Face went on a journey across Flanders to Dunes, another
Cistercian house, where the abbot had requested its presence for the inau-
guration of a new church.56 That the icon was considered worthy of the
effort of the voyage, and that it was displayed at stops along the way where
it was reported to have performed miracles, point toward a perception of
the object as having some intrinsic material and spiritual property that
made it more like a relic or a miraculous image (such as the Cruciixion
or certain statues of the Virgin and Child) than an illustration or didactic
image. It wasn’t that the Sainte Face looked like the Veronica, though the
letter claims it did (contra the bust-portrait description given by Gervase
of Tilbury), but that it was ontologically like the Veronica, a true image.
The nature of the Holy Face itself, as an iconographic subject that ig-
ures the ultimate end of spiritual vision, exerted a powerful magnetism,
drawing the object of the devotional gaze ever back toward its origin as
a miraculously generated image – literally an imprint of Christ. The near
invisibility of the Roman Veronica eased the way for an icon like the Sainte
Face to become in its own right a miraculous image, because the resem-
blance (or lack thereof) between the two objects remained always vague in
visual terms. In addition, by the time the Sainte Face came to France, the
Mandylion of Constantinople – an equally obscured object – had perhaps
been installed in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, further indicating that it
was entirely possible for more than one authoritative image of the Holy
Face to circulate.57 Herbert Kessler, writing of Byzantine Mandylion icons
(like the Sainte Face) in their original Orthodox context, observed that the
materiality of any given icon, along with its place in the sequence of artistic
transmission, was mostly irrelevant, since all icons were copies of a divine
original and invested with the authenticity and authority of that origi-
nal – in the case of the Mandylion, the incarnate face of God.58 In western
Europe, where the complex theology of the icon was poorly understood,
this much at least still seems to have pertained.
Modern iconological analysis tells the modern viewer that the Sainte
Face belongs to a class of icons indigenous to eastern Europe and tied to
the Mandylion, eliminating the medieval vagueness about the work. The
question of its resemblance to the Roman Veronica is made more difi-
cult to answer by the possible loss or destruction of that image in the sack
of Rome in 1527, and by the strenuous efforts of the papacy in the later
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to suppress the cult. Today, there is a
“Veronica” in the Vatican purported to be the same as that so celebrated
in the Middle Ages, but it has not been subject to scholarly examination
and is more or less shrouded in secrecy. Confusing the issue further are the
numerous competing objects that since the early modern period Catholics
have embraced as the “authentic” Veronica; the Manoppello image pro-
moted by Pope Benedict XVI since 2006 is only the most recently cele-
brated of these.
Because such witnesses to the appearance of the object irst enthusiasti-
cally promoted by Innocent III are highly unreliable, a number of art histo-
rians have sought to recover the appearance of the lost Veronica by relying
on a group of pictures found in manuscripts associated with Benedictine
patronage and production in mid-thirteenth-century England.59 Of par-
ticular interest have been the autograph manuscript of Matthew Paris’s
Chronica Majora (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16) dated to
around 1250, and an addition from about 1240 to an illustrated Psalter of
the 1220s (London, British Library, MS Arundel 157, fol. 2), also attributed
to Matthew. Hereafter, I will call these the Chronica Majora Veronica and the
Arundel Veronica. Although both of these images correspond very closely
to Gervase of Tilbury’s description of the Veronica as a bust with the neck
included, as evidence for the appearance of the Roman object, they are at
best problematic. Matthew was familiar with Gervase’s Otia, so it seems
likely that instead of reproducing a token or sketch of the Roman object,
the visibility of which was so tightly regulated, he was simply responding
visually to Gervase’s eyewitness account.60 Fortunately for the purposes of
my discussion here, it matters less what the Roman Veronica looked like in
material terms and more how it was meant to be looked at.
Because the Arundel Veronica (Figure 4) is inserted into a Psalter, its
primary purpose appears to have been devotional. Indeed, the text that
accompanies it has the character of the brief, para-liturgical ofices that
monks, nuns, and their lay emulators favored in this period. I have detailed
the contents of this little ofice in the appendix to this chapter in order to
give a sense of how the text changed between the different manuscript wit-
nesses I discuss here; in all its versions, it incorporates a selection of verses
from Psalms, the incipits of several venerable prayers, including the Pater
noster, and some special petitions addressed speciically to the Veronica. In
the Arundel Psalter, the ofice is written beneath the half-page miniature
of the Veronica, and it includes the full text of a prayer Matthew would
later attribute to Innocent III. The Arundel Veronica, however, provides
the earliest witness to the ofice and the prayer.61 It is worth citing in full
because the language is so rich in visual imagery and so closely tied to the
painting directly above.
4. Attributed
to Matthew
Paris, Veronica,
England, ca.
1240 (London,
British Library
MS Arundel 157,
fol. 2). Photo
© The British
Library Board
Lord, you have left behind for us, who are marked by the light of your face,
the image imprinted on the cloth of Veronica as your memento. Grant, for the
sake of your Passion and the cross, that we who now adore on this earth in a
mirror and a parable, shall one day see you face to face as judge, on the good
side. Who lives and rules with God the Father in unity with the Holy Spirit,
forever and ever. Amen.62
The opening line borrows from Psalm 4:7, “The light of thy counte-
nance O Lord, is signed upon us,” which is also the irst of the psalm verses
quoted in the preceding text of the ofice; this along with the other psalm
verses cited in the ofice (Psalm 85:17, “Shew me a token (signum) for
good: that they who hate me may see, and be confounded,” and Psalm
79:20, “O Lord God of hosts, convert us: and shew thy face, and we shall
be saved”) help articulate the idea that seeing the face of God is a trans-
formational experience that quite literally imprints itself on the soul. If the
Veronica itself is understood as an imprint, then the sight of this imprint
conveys at least some vestige of that salviic vision. Meanwhile, the famil-
iar Pauline per speculum in enigmate reminds us that the face of Christ, as
seen in Matthew’s painting, is one such relection in which the immanent
face-to-face encounter can be found, and through which its transformative
effect (e.g., the judgment of the soul) may be transmitted.
On the page facing the Arundel Veronica, an additional note in Matthew’s
hand further underscores the devotional eficacy of the Holy Face by
repeating the prayer in a slightly altered form and adding, in relation to a
mention of the indulgences attached to the prayer, the remark, “The face
of the Savior is here depicted by the work of the artist in order that the soul
may dedicate itself to devotion.”63 Mining the biblical texts for references
to sealing, stamping, and signing, the author of this little ofice underscores
the Veronica’s ontological status as a true image, a direct impression, but
also suggests the ininite reproducibility of that image. Matthew further
stresses this aspect of reproducibility by coming clean about the mechanics
of how the painting got to be there: “by the work of the artist.” Perhaps this
is unproblematic in Matthew’s view because just as any number of impres-
sions from a seal into any number of blobs of wax would be considered
equally authoritative, so would any number of depictions of the Holy Face
bear equal signiicance.64 It is what the image does – increase the devotion
of the soul – rather than what it is in a material sense or how it is made that
matters.
The power of the metaphor of sealing for a medieval audience can hardly
be underestimated. Biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation insistently
return to the topos of the seal, and patristic commentators made much
of this predilection. In the twelfth century, Peter Abelard’s Trinitarian
analogy, found in his Theologia scholarium (ca. 1130s), famously likens the
Trinity to a bronze seal. The seal is one thing triune in nature, in that it is
made from bronze, bears an image, and can be used to impress that image
into soft wax, so, Abelard concludes, “In the same way, that the seal is made
from bronze and in certain fashion propagates itself, thus the Son has his
substance from the Father, and therefore can be said to be generated by
the Father.”65 The analogy, though decried as heretical by Abelard’s critics,
proved durable and was sometimes invoked by more orthodox theologians,

as Rachel Fulton has shown.66 The most important aspect of this simile, in
terms of Matthew’s Veronica, is the idea that the image borne by the seal
can be endlessly impressed on the material world (the wax) without losing
any of its authenticity or idelity to the matrix. The Arundel Veronica is just
another impression, no better and no worse than any other.
Just as Jacques Pantaléon indicated that Sybille should use the Sainte Face
to inlame her devotion, the ofice that accompanies the inserted image of
the Arundel Veronica encourages the viewer to engage in an intimate con-
templation of the future face-to-face encounter of the soul with God. The
composition of the picture itself also seems calibrated to stir up the soul.
Within a gilded, polychrome frame, the bust of Christ appears in full color.
This painterly rather than draughtsman-like technique is rare in the oeuvre
of Matthew Paris, as Melanie Holcomb has pointed out; he seems to have
chosen the rich, opaque colors to evoke the appearance of Byzantine icons
or western European paintings inluenced by such icons that he could have
seen at St. Albans or on his travels away from the monastery.67 The frontal
face, with its clearly Byzantine-inluenced symmetry, modeling, and exag-
gerated cranium, gazes out impassively, the irises and pupils lifted toward
the upper lid just enough that the viewer is always just below the depicted
gaze. We look upon the Holy Face, but it does not acknowledge us. Color
heightens the sense of the image’s lifelike immanence: the strong persim-
mon red painted within the golden arc of the halo contrasts with the deep
blue of the background, and the softly saturated green of the mantle that
falls over one shoulder of the igure plays against the yellow tones of the
skin and the deep rosy blush in the cheeks. The composition, too, increases
the igure’s presence – the halo breaks the inner part of the upper conines
of the frame, placing Christ somewhere in front of the picture plane.
Pictorially, no effort was made to evoke the legendary origins of the
Veronica described in the prayer that follows. If anything, the strong
contrast between igure and ground undermines the possibility that the
picture is a visually accurate reproduction of its original, or rather of the
object in Rome, which was explicitly understood as a cloth (sudarium
is usually politely translated as handkerchief or napkin though perhaps
sweat-rag would be more faithful to its meaning); later medieval and early
modern representations of the Veronica make this textile identity clear –
most often, the image of the Holy Face appears on a cloth held by Saint
Veronica. The Arundel Veronica is quite frankly a painting, vivid and
spatially sophisticated. Even the play between the lat, loral motif that
adorns the neckband of the igure’s tunic and the virtuoso modeling of the
neck, cheeks, and brows calls attention to the hand of the artist. The clear
visual reference to Byzantine sources also serves as a trace of the act of
making – most icons were unquestionably the work of painters, but at the
same time they had a special authorizing origin in divine image-making.
Many icon types brought with them a legend of spontaneous generation;
they were direct imprints of the divine seal. Suzanne Lewis notes that the
pointedly Byzantinizing style of the Arundel Veronica in contrast to the
early thirteenth-century cycle of prefatory miniatures in the manuscript
helps identify the work with this special quality of icons – their authori-
tative nature.68 The stylistic choices Matthew made were seldom random,
and here he quite clearly engages in some deep play. While acknowledging
and even drawing attention to the artiice of the image in both pictorial
choices and in his text on the facing page, at the same time he presents its
spiritual eficacy. Subtly, he works to liberate the Veronica from the rit-
ual control of the object in Rome, and to raise the status of made images
as tools of devotion. It is important to keep in mind that at this point
in the mid-thirteenth century, the ubiquitous copies of the Veronica that
would later circulate and characterize the image as a “mediatised” cult (in
Gerhard Wolf’s formulation) were not yet common, so Matthew’s assertive
appropriation of the numen of the object in Rome for his own, patently
man-made copy is all the more remarkable.
What impetus drove Matthew to picture the Veronica in the irst place
remains uncertain – Suzanne Lewis has suggested that perhaps it had to
do with the attachment of papal indulgences to veneration of the object
and recitation of the prayer Ave facies praeclara by Innocent IV in 1243.69
However, this is problematic because there is no evidence beyond an anec-
dote connecting Innocent IV to Ave facies praeclara, thought to be a work
of the fourteenth century, based on its metrical scheme, which was not
one ever employed by Innocent IV.70 Furthermore, between the beginning
and the middle of the thirteenth century, practices of granting indulgences
changed considerably, and Innocent III – to whom Matthew attributed the
indulgence – was generally concerned with limiting rather than expand-
ing the practice. It therefore seems possible that Matthew’s association of
indulgence with the prayer and image is a rather hopeful interpretation
of the papal letter establishing the Veronica’s procession, which mentions
only that the pope is doing this “in order to promote and obtain indulgence
for sinners.”71
Whatever motivated him, some part of Matthew’s impulse must have
had its origins in his identity as a monk and a maker of images. His sec-
ond surviving Veronica (Figure 5) gives much stronger evidence that he
actively resisted the idea that the papacy could control and regulate the
Holy Face. It also reveals that his attitude toward the role of pictures in
devotion was rather forward looking and distinct from the conservative
notion that divided pictures, as “books for the illiterate,” from objects – like
5. Matthew Paris, Veronica, from the

Chronica Majora, England, ca. 1250
(Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS
16, fol. 49v). Photo courtesy of the Master
and Fellows of Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge
the Roman Veronica – that had a numen of their own. This second image,
along with its accompanying text, places the Veronica in the context not
of a devotional book but a chronicle. Although tied to the narrative, both
image and text shift the reader’s role from that of a literate consumer of
history to that of a person engaged in devotion.
The illustration of the Veronica in the Chronica Majora belongs to
one of Matthew’s additions to the chronicle of his predecessor, Roger of
Wendover. These additions, with which Matthew interpolated Roger’s text
as he copied it into his own chronicle, have been characterized by Suzanne
Lewis as highly personal and revelatory of Matthew’s prejudices and loyal-
ties.72 In this instance, Matthew’s anti-papal sentiments lead him away from
Roger’s account of the rebellion of the English barons (at the instigation
of the future King Louis VIII of France) against the newly crowned King
Henry III in 1216, into a digression about Pope Innocent III, a disastrous
shepherd of the Church in Matthew’s view.
While Fortune’s dice aggravated the turbulent state of the English realm,
Lord Pope Innocent, who had won the care of the Church through vacilla-
tion, caused the image of the face of the Lord, habitually called the Veronica,
to be carried reverentially in procession from the church of Saint Peter to
the hospital of the Holy Ghost. Which being done, this image while being
displayed turned all by itself, so that it was upside down: namely, it was posi-
tioned with its forehead below, its beard above. This illed the Lord Pope
with dread, for he believed that this was an ill omen for him, and so to make
full reconciliation with God upon the advice of his fellows he composed an
elegant prayer in honor of this image called the Veronica. To this he added
several Psalms and versicles, and to those who say it he conceded ten days’
indulgence, that is to say that those who repeat the whole thing daily are given
indulgence. Many people therefore memorized the prayer and those things
that go with it, and in order to more greatly inlame their devotion made an
image in this manner.73
Matthew’s account being the only one of this untoward event, it is impos-
sible to determine the factuality of his reportage. Did the incident really
occur? And if it did, did Innocent really interpret it as an ill omen? Given
Matthew’s general resentment of papal interference in the English Church,
and especially his speciic perception of Innocent III’s condemnable role in
manipulating the equally unsteady King John into signing off on a “carta
detestibilis” (most hateful charter) that submitted the English crown to
papal authority in Church matters, it seems to offer a convenient analogy.74
On the preceding page (fol. 48v), a marginal illustration to Matthew’s
vituperative epitaph to King John depicts the crown of England tipping
uncertainly atop a plinth inscribed with the lament, “Vae labenti coronae
Angliae” (Woe to tottering crown of England), and beside this an inverted
shield with the arms of England.75 It cannot be an accident that Matthew
then leads into his story about the Veronica on the facing page by connect-
ing the “turbulence” at home to the unstable leadership of the Church by
Innocent. The topsy-turvy of English politics is mirrored in the behavior
of the Veronica when it “turned all by itself, so that it was upside down:
namely, it was positioned with its forehead below, its beard above.”
Beneath this account with its clear indictment of Innocent, we see a
column-wide miniature depicting a frontal bust of Christ. Two important
formal aspects of this miniature deserve further investigation. The irst is
that Matthew carefully distinguished this drawing from others in the man-
uscript by placing it in the text column rather than the margin, carefully
framing it, and tinting it, while at the same time allowing it to remain
visibly and incontestably a drawing, unlike his earlier Arundel Veronica,
which is so assertively a painting. Melanie Holcomb has argued that for a

medieval artist to choose to draw rather than paint an image constituted
a purposeful and meaningful aesthetic choice. Particularly in the environ-
ment of a venerable Benedictine house that could trace its roots to the
Anglo-Saxon period, such as Matthew’s St. Albans, drawing had a long and
freighted history; associated with monastic reform movements since the
ninth century, and particularly linked with foundational English saints,
incuding Dunstan and Aethelstan, drawing was the medium par excellence
of monastic book arts.76 The second formal point worth noting is that the
drawing is executed on a separate sheet of parchment and pasted into the
column. Just as the Veronica inserted into the Arundel Psalter draws atten-
tion to the role of an artist in its making, this Veronica is clearly presented
as a product of a particular sort of artistic labor. The obvious character of
the image as a drawing by Matthew’s own hand, along with its identity as
an object distinct from the page on which it appears, draws attention to the
artiiciality and materiality of the image. It seems reasonable to ask why the
image is pasted in, despite that Matthew planned, wrote, and illustrated the
Chronica and the miniature occupies a space on the page clearly designed
to accommodate it.77
Matthew posits his image as both a made image and a true image, admit-
ting no disjuncture between these two categories: one need not go to
Rome to encounter the Veronica in order to receive its spiritual beneit, for
a homemade picture such as this will serve the same purpose just as effec-
tively as the Roman Veronica might. The singular character of the Roman
Veronica is irrelevant, or at least incidental, to the devotional purpose of
the image of the Holy Face. Christopher Wood has commented on this
medieval “substitional paradigm,” in which no matter how many copies of
an authoritative image are created, each stands on its own without refer-
ence to the others. However, he has also noted that once text is introduced
to frame and explain the image, it draws attention to the originary image’s
historicity and opens the possibility of a skeptical viewer.78 Whereas Wood
situates this explanatory urge in terms of German Renaissance devotional
prints, Matthew’s treatment of the Chronica Majora Veronica already strives
to situate it historically and authenticate its miraculous nature at the same
time it breaks the image free of the object. His comment that “Many peo-
ple therefore memorized the prayer and those things that go with it, and in
order to more greatly inlame their devotion made an image in this man-
ner” highlights the human agency of the image-maker and reminds the
book’s reader that the image on the page is just one example of many such
efigies.
The claim, akin to Matthew’s statement about the “work of the artist” in
the Arundel manuscript, deserves some careful scrutiny. The prayer, which
he says many people had committed to memory, appears for the irst time
in his own earlier rendition of the Veronica, and is not attested outside of
Matthew’s English Benedictine milieu until later in the century. Matthew
attributes it to Innocent, but it is not a text found among the known writ-
ings of that pope. The allusion to “things that go with” the prayer seems
to indicate the image itself, but just as medieval descriptions of the Roman
Veronica screen it from view, and just as the liturgical paraphernalia of the
ciborium, the ostensory, and the veil also made its exact appearance a mys-
tery, this circumlocution leaves the precise nature of the “things” vague.
The second half of the statement counters this with a very speciic refer-
ence to the picture visible immediately above: “and . . . made a picture in
this manner.” One imagines whole legions of devout individuals carrying
about little parchment leaves with tinted drawings of a generalized image
of the Holy Face, reciting the ofice from memory.
By the late fourteenth century, the possession of just such little leaves
was in fact quite common, but not in Matthew’s day. Matthew plays with
the relationship between the animate object and the image it is imag-
ined to bear by including both in the account of the otherwise unattested
miraculous inversion of the Roman relic. The object itself can move about
and express its divine disapprobation in this way, but the image can also be
detached from its physical support and move about through the medium
of memory and artistic making. These movements, however, are a result
not of its own animation but of the desire of devout Christians to remem-
ber, to see, and, above all, to be imprinted, or “signed,” with the light of
Christ’s face. From being attached to a cult object, the focus of intensely
reverential but liturgically structured attention, the image of the Holy Face
becomes a free-loating visual experience, a picture designed to arouse
devotion even in the midst of reading a monastic chronicle. The Chronica
Majora is dense with saints and miracles, but I know of no other instance
when a prayer relevant to the narrative is inserted in this way. In effect,
what Matthew’s drawing and its attendant text claim is that the devotional
experience of the Veronica is not limited by time or place. The spiritual
beneits of contemplating the Holy Face can be experienced whether or
not one has access to the Veronica in Rome. In fact, maybe they are better
experienced this way: in Matthew’s text the Veronica expresses divine dis-
pleasure by turning on its head. The reader, by contrast, views the image
right side up.
Flora Lewis has pointed out the primarily devotional character of
Matthew’s images of the Veronica, and Paul Binski has situated Matthew’s
devotional images within an English monastic tradition that focused on the
beatiic vision.79 I would add to this and argue that Matthew is in a sense
reinventing or translating the Veronica for the purpose of contemplative
devotion, using a kind of recombinant technology in order to retrieve the

image from a purely materialist conception. There is evidence for this in
the status of Matthew’s two Veronicas as the earliest images of their kind
and also, in the Chronica, in the careful framing of the picture in opposition
to the historical narrative it illustrates. This is because, despite Matthew’s
assertion that many people made copies of the Veronica for devotional pur-
poses, the picture in the Chronica Majora counts among a very small num-
ber of extant mid-thirteenth-century works explicitly claiming to represent
the Veronica. Of these, the majority are close cousins to Matthew’s, found
in books that belong to what Suzanne Lewis describes as a restricted group
of Benedictine and Augustinian institutions in England in the middle of
the thirteenth century.80 Picturing the Veronica and claiming devotional
eficacy for the resulting picture relects a point of view consistent with
Matthew’s general bias toward Benedictine autonomy and against papal
meddling and regulation.
All the same, the primary emphasis of the Chronica image remains devo-
tional, rather than illustrative, didactic, or political. Matthew’s ultimate
purpose in keeping a chronicle was not to make a name for himself as a
historian or to serve a wealthy patron but to perform the opus dei, the essen-
tial labor that, in the Benedictine outlook, constituted prayer; stopping to
pray in the middle of reading or writing a chronicle such as Matthew’s
would have been as natural as breathing for a thirteenth-century monk.
Furthermore, the likeness of Christ fascinated Matthew, and he returned
to it repeatedly, in different forms, collating an entire vocabulary of devo-
tional images within the context of his writings. The provocative compos-
ite image at the end of Chronica Majora (probably originally a frontispiece),
in which Matthew brings together bust-length portraits of the Virgin and
Child, the suffering Christ, and the majestic Christ, all most likely drawn
from full-length versions of these iconographic types, indicates that his
worldly work of chronicle keeping is in fact driven by his monastic, devo-
tional outlook.81 He also made a habit of inserting verbal reference to or
images of himself into these devotional pictures. In the full-page tinted
drawing of the enthroned Madonna and Child in the Historia Anglorum
(Figure 6),82 he kneels in partial prostration, just below the frame of the
main image, identiied by red and blue capitals as Frates Mattias Parisiensis
and gesturing toward the words of a prayer from a sermon by Augustine:
“Oh happy kiss with milky lips impressed, abundant evidence along with
the infant crawling and gamboling about you that you are truly the mother
of this son: verily the only begotten son of God!”83 Such artistic self-
representation (especially on the part of an artist-scribe) has a long history
in medieval art, which I explore in greater depth in the next chapter.84 In
the particularly English, Benedictine context in which Matthew worked,
6. Matthew
Paris, self-
portrait with
enthroned
Virgin and
Child, Historia
Anglorum,
England, 1250s
(British Library
MS Royal 14
c. vii, fol. 232).
© The British
Library Board
earlier self-referential images of monastic scribes/artists must have con-

tributed to the conception of the drawing, the closest parallel being that
of Dunstan prostrate before Christ in the Glastonbury Classbook (Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F.4.32, fol. 1), dating to the second half of the
tenth century.
In Matthew’s formulation of the self-referential, devotional image, his

igure makes a visual rhyme with that of the infant Christ, who bestows his
“happy kiss” on the Virgin’s cheek, beside her mouth. His face “upturned”
and igure “closely pressed” into the text, his hands delicately supporting
and even seeming to dandle the written words just as the baby toys with
his mother’s hair, Matthew makes his act of making into an authenticating
gesture, a ritualized kiss but also a Christomimetic bodily posture of crawl-
ing – as in the Latin “reptantis infantiae” (the infant crawling).85 Although
Joseph Koerner has interpreted Matthew’s self-portrait as the condensa-
tion of medieval artistic self-representation, characterized by submission to
rather than identiication with the deity, I would characterize the pictorial
implications as more complex.86 Although Matthew’s kiss may be that of
a vassal, it is also that of the infant whose very infancy conirms the divine
motherhood of Mary. In fact, in the ritual of vassalage, it is always the domi-
nant igure who bestows the kiss that seals the relationship.87 Furthermore,
as Michael Camille has pointed out, the mystical dimension of the kiss,
rooted in the transcendent language of the Song of Songs, allows this to
be an image of spiritual union.88 Given the language of the prayers that
Matthew attaches to his images of the Veronica, which emphasizes sealing,
leaving an imprint, and the making of pictures, this self-portrait begins to
hum with a current of something far more complex and intriguing than
false modesty or formulaic humility. Like Dürer two and a half centuries
later, Matthew depicts himself, as a maker of pictures, as engaged in a form
of Christomimesis, piously assimilating self to deity through the very act
of representation.
Matthew’s concurrent visual and textual interests in representing the
true face of God and representing his own involvement in representa-
tion speak to the relationship between the Holy Face and the portrait-like
image more generally. Whereas Matthew, as artist and writer, controls his
production, and quite literally has a hand in it, most medieval book own-
ers were not so placed. Particularly as the commercial development of the
book trade took place over the course of the thirteenth century, the rela-
tionship between a book owner and the visual and textual content of the
book became increasingly layered with both spoken and unspoken expec-
tations, assumptions, and intentions. The book owner, gazing at an image
in his or her book, was distanced from the production of that image by
commercial transactions that could involve multiple parties, among whom
the intended owner might or might not number. In the case of female
recipients of books, in particular, the act of giving could work to constrain
or prescribe the viewer’s psychological, sexual, and spiritual identity, as
Madeleine Caviness has argued.89 Unlike Matthew, who wrests control of
the Veronica from the ritual, material, and geographical limitations of its
Roman cult, the book owner is not the “owner” of the images she sees.
Nevertheless, just as Matthew’s Veronicas (and other devotional images)
inscribe him as Christomimetic maker, the diffusion of the Veronica as
a devotional image in the later part of the century would open a space
in which the book owner could begin to lay claim to a different sort of
Christomimesis. In this sense, the Veronica, as a reproducible image and
as a sublime spiritual experience, points toward the multiple subjectivities
inherent in prayer books made for the laity.
Visual Prayers: Uses of the Veronica
Matthew’s Veronicas belong to a small and iconographically distinct fam-

ily probably descended from Matthew’s visual interpretation of Gervase
of Tilbury’s description of the Roman object. However, other represen-
tations of the Veronica, some sharing Matthew’s bust-length format
and some more similar to the Mandylion-type iconography introduced
through the import, circulation, and copying of Eastern icons, attest to
a more widespread interest in picturing the Holy Face. Regardless of its
visual origin, the appeal of the Holy Face was rooted in the Roman cult
of the Veronica, as the texts that so often attend it make clear. Matthew’s
midcentury account of the miraculous inversion of 1216 and the “elegant
prayer” he attributes to Innocent III cannot be corroborated in any ear-
lier source, but the prayer, which makes speciic reference to the Veronica,
circulated later as an authentically papal text.90 In addition to the Arundel
and Chronica Majora examples, both by Matthew, it also appears in many
of the closely related instances of the Veronica noted by Lewis, such as the
Westminster Psalter (British Library MS Royal 2.A.XXII, fol. 221v), the
Lambeth Apocalypse (Lambeth Palace MS 209, fol. 53v), and the Evesham
Psalter (British Library MS Add. 44874).91 But it was not limited to asso-
ciation with the bust-portrait iconography of these works.
For example, a devotional diptych inserted between Psalms 108 and 109
in an English Psalter of 1270–1280 from the diocese of Norwich (Lambeth
Palace Library MS 328, fols. 95v–96) presents a different view than
Matthew’s more embodied vision of the Veronica (Figure 7). The full-page
miniature on the left side of the opening features a remarkably soft-faced,
youthful Christ, his wispy beard barely serving to make him masculine.
The neck is depicted, as in the Veronicas of Matthew and his followers,
but then something strange occurs. Whereas Matthew depicted the collar
of Christ’s robe as a kind of lattening contrast to the modeling of his face,
this artist has understood the collar as a framing element: beneath it there
are no shoulders, and no indications of any further body. Instead, the head
7. Holy Face, Psalter, England (Norwich), 1270–1280

(Lambeth Palace Library MS 328, fol. 95v). Photo The
Trustees of the Lambeth Palace Library
and neck loat, disembodied, on the pink ground. The effect is disconcert-
ing, and its very strangeness suggests the dreamlike quality of visionary
experience. Across the opening, the rubric to the accompanying ofice is in
Anglo-Norman couplets: “The apostle Innocent has promised this to all
who say this prayer with good intention. They shall have forty days of par-
don if they say it each day for two hundred and forty days.”92 This rubric
leaves out any mention of the image itself, and thus avoids Matthew’s insis-
tence about the materiality of the picture as a picture. The cursory inal
reference to Psalm 4:7 strongly indicates that by the late thirteenth cen-
tury the ofice was well enough known that a shorthand indicator could be
substituted for the full text, so perhaps the picture, too, needed no further
explanation. On its own it could be hoped to spur the appropriate devo-
tional response.
A Psalter created for a house of Cistercian nuns in the vicinity of Lake
Constance in about 1260 shows that the visionary possibilities of the text
and image combination irst worked out by Matthew resonated on the
Continent, and outside of Benedictine circles as well. A full-page illumi-
nation in the “Bonmont Psalter” weaves together prayer and picture in
a fashion reminiscent of some of the great works of visionary word-and-
image composition from the Rhineland in the twelfth century (Figure 8).93
Within a polylobed frame, the bust of Christ appears, to some degree simi-
lar in format to Matthew’s two examples but stylistically very much a prod-
uct of its place of origin – Christ’s bee-stung, red lips and apple cheeks, the
8. Holy Face,
Bonmont Psalter,
Upper Rhine, ca.
1260 (Besançon,
Bibliothèque
Municipale, MS
54, fol. 18). Photo
CNRS-IRHT,
©Bibliothèque
municipale de
Besançon
elaborate, heavily outlined curls of his hair, and sharp, metallic folds of his
tunic below the neckline all relect the style of the region. This severely
frontal depiction with its green cross-nimbus appears on a “gold” ground,
indicated by a wash of light-brown paint rather than gilding, a technique
that both nods toward the Cistercian aesthetic of simplicity and evokes the
look of imported icons.94 Around the polylobed frame that encloses the
Holy Face, another, rectangular frame in red and green encloses the text
space. The text enclosed in this frame is basically the same ofice ascribed
by Matthew to Innocent III, with a few slight differences, as seen in the

appendix to this chapter.95 It is dificult to read, because the long horizon-
tal lines of text continue from one side of the inner frame that contains the
picture to the other. In several instances, words are broken up so that in
order to read them, the eye has to scan over the framed image. One word
to be broken up in this way is the name of the image itself. The “Ve” of
“Veronice” appears to the left of the frame, directly below the join between
the left half-circular element and the polygonal element, while the “ronice”
appears in the corresponding space to the right. To read the word, the eye
must pass across the very image it describes. In the next line of text, another
descriptive term, “sudario,” is broken at the end of the line (“suda”), so the
reader must once again scan over the image as the eye seeks the end of the
word. This is all the more signiicant in Latin because of the grammatical
weight borne by Latin word endings.
The engagement between word and image in this Cistercian picture,
intended for a feminine audience, corresponds to the tenor of Cistercian
female devotion in the thirteenth century as recent scholarship has charac-
terized it: image-intensive, visually imaginative, and focused on the goal of
transcendent, spiritual vision.96 The connection between Matthew’s con-
servative, English, Benedictine circles and the Cistercian women of the
Rhineland is unclear, and although it is possible that through exchange
and copying the model proposed by Matthew would have been available
to the illuminator and scribe of the Bonmont Psalter, it is more probable
that the Bonmont scribe and illuminator shared a common source with
Matthew, perhaps the textual source provided by Gervase of Tilbury’s
Otia.97 However, it is clear that the makers of this manuscript were not
content to let the reader determine the pace of movement between word
and image. Particularly in contrast to other images in the Bonmont Psalter,
this picture and text combination takes on an urgently visionary qual-
ity. Other partially painted images, which include hagiographic narrative
scenes, spiritual diagrams, and depictions of standing saints, feature only
the pictorial subject with no more than a titulus. These alternate through-
out the prefatory cycle with a series of fully colored miniatures, with gold
grounds and deeply saturated colors, focusing on Christological narrative
and including no written material at all.
Given the cramped way the ofice its around the image on the Holy
Face page, I would venture that it was not part of the original plan but
that its inclusion seemed necessary to give the image its full salviic value.
After all, in Matthew’s account, one needed to say the prayer to receive the
indulgence. On the other hand, the way the text works with and around
the image increases its visionary quality – unlike Matthew’s work, which
draws attention to its own status as “made,” this image literally scans as
“the Veronica.” The omission of any rubric mentioning “this image” or

“this picture” also serves to assimilate it with the miraculous image of the
Holy Face – it seems almost a pictorialization of the pleas for a “sign for the
good” and a vision of the countenance of God extracted from the psalms
in the ofice.
The Bonmont Psalter Veronica shifts emphasis away from Matthew’s
concern with artistic rendition toward a more abstract and visionary con-
ception of the Holy Face. In so doing, it sheds some light on how the
practice of picturing the Veronica could be reframed for audiences very
different from Matthew and his English monastic cohort. Cistercian nuns,
who by their vocation and their gender were at least ideally more divorced
from the political concerns of Matthew and his peers, could equally bene-
it from the translation of the Veronica from a discrete material object to
an intellectualized image. Similarly, laywomen, whose devotional routines
were modeled on those of their cloistered sisters, stood to gain spiritually
from the reproducibility of the Veronica as a visual experience. An exam-
ple of how representations of the Veronica might function in the context
of devotion is visible in one of the irst instances of the association of the
ofice of the Holy Face with a fully disembodied, Mandylion-style repre-
sentation: the full-page miniature found in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of
Soissons (Color Plate II). It faces, across the opening, a text closely related
to that found in the slightly earlier English examples, though closer still
to that found in the Bonmont Psalter (for comparison, see this chapter’s
appendix).98 Unlike the English examples and the Bonmont Psalter, how-
ever, it depicts the disembodied head of Christ loating on a golden cruci-
form halo over a blue patterned ground, contained within an architectural
framework strongly reminiscent of the turrets, lancets, and buttresses of the
Cathedral of Amiens.99 The iconography suggests that the artist and audi-
ence both were familiar with the Mandylion-type icon. Laon, where the
Sainte Face resided, is only about 125 kilometers from Amiens, where the
manuscript was produced. This added to the icon’s fame in the region and
the origin of the book’s irst owner or owners in the Diocese of Soissons (in
which Sybille Pantaléon’s convent of Montreuil-les-Dames was located)
probably contributed to the choice of the disembodied head over the more
conventional bust-length portrait type. It is even possible that the book’s
intended viewers had seen the Sainte Face, as it was annually exhibited in a
procession closely recalling that of the Veronica in Rome.100
The introduction to the ofice, situated across the opening from the
image, stresses the luidity between liturgical and extra-liturgical devotion;
here, the image is posited as an aid to the devotee’s participation in the rite
of the Mass, deepening her personal engagement with its central ritual,
the Eucharist. The vernacular rubric reads “Innocent, the Pope of Rome,
composed this prayer for the remission of all sinners. Whosoever says this
prayer at the sacrament will have sixty days of pardon” (emphasis added).101
Leaving aside the inlation of indulgences over the decades, the crux of this
statement lies in its reference to the Mass. Beginning with Karen Gould,
numerous modern observers have noted the Eucharistic character of the
image itself – the cruciform halo imprinted with the eerily loating head
of Christ can and should be understood as referring visually to the Host,
especially because it is contained in a reliquary- or church-like architec-
tural frame.102 The English images seem to discount the singularity, and
therefore materiality, of the Veronica in Rome, celebrating it as an image
and freeing it, as it were, from papal control; in this, the metaphor of the
Eucharist is a useful tool. The Veronica is like the Eucharist in its repro-
ducibility without loss of authenticity. In the “Yolande of Soissons” version,
the material nature of the Veronica is fully elided with that of the Host;
they are not incidentally similar to, but substantially like, one another.
Another example that takes up this elision of Holy Face and Eucharistic
Host is slightly later, but perhaps was created under the inluence of the
Laon Holy Face, and comes from an Hours of the use of Châlons-sur-
Marne, dated to the irst quarter of the fourteenth century (Figure 9). The
disembodied head with its pale lavender nimbus loats on a golden ground,
framed beneath the text of the prayer “Deus qui nobis signatis [sic] lumine
vultus tui memorial . . .” found so often in the ofice of the Holy Face.
Without denying the clergy its authority, the picture, in conjunction with
the text, opens a space in which a layperson can commune with the physi-
cal presence of God through the faculty of bodily vision even as the priest
consecrates the Host. In this sense, it is more audacious than Matthew’s
picture: it claims for its viewer the power to ascend toward that ultimate
communion, the beatiic vision.
At the same time, it reinforces the authority of the clergy – you need a
priest if you really want to “say this prayer at the sacrament” and get your
sixty days of pardon. That is, unless the image itself is the sacrament. By
substituting the iconography of the bust portrait with this more disem-
bodied and visionary Holy Face, and by including clear visual allusions to
the Host, the makers of this book have at least created the possibility that
the viewer might confuse (intentionally or unintentionally) sacrament and
image. Probably, the image was used both ways: as a complement to the
actual Mass as it was experienced in the consecrated space of the church
or chapel, and as an extra-liturgical device for recapturing the powerful
moment when the Host was briely visible to the lay audience and the
hungering soul yearned toward it. Because laypeople had restricted access
to the Host in the later thirteenth century, substitute experiences were
highly sought after. “Spiritual communion,” irst proposed by Anselm of
9. Holy Face, Hours of the Use of Châlons-sur-Marne, irst quarter of fourteenth century (Baltimore, Walters
Art Gallery, MS W.93, fol. 147v). ©The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Canterbury in the early twelfth century, arose from intense visual concen-
tration on the elevated Host, and by the end of the thirteenth century,
churchmen were complaining that congregants were likely to attend only
the elevation at the expense of the rest of the liturgy.103 The numinous,
disembodied appearance of the Yolande of Soissons Holy Face, along with
the French rubric, certainly suggest an approach in which contemplation
of the image in the book might serve as an acceptable substitute for actual
participation in the Mass.
Furthermore, whereas Matthew’s combination of text and image, partic-
ularly in the Chronica, suggests parity between the object in Rome and the
handcrafted image on the page, the text in the Yolande de Soissons example
elides the image on the page and the singular object. Compare the plea in
the inal prayer in the Matthew Paris version, “per passionem et crucem
tuam” (for the sake of your passion and the Cross), to the Yolande version,
“per passionem et crucem tuam et sanctum sudarium” (for the sake of your
passion, the Cross, and your holy sudarium). The addition of the mention
of the sudarium does two things: irst, it stakes a claim for the facing image
as the sudarium itself, and second, it includes that object in the company of
fundamental symbols of Christ’s sacriice, elevating it from a by-product of
a lesser miraculous event to a universally signiicant representation of the
central, redemptive mystery of the faith. Read along with the disembodied
and spatially dislocated image it faces, the text takes the viewer beyond the
boundaries of experiential time and space, into the sphere of perception
Augustine would describe as intellectual – that is, a realm in which the
soul perceives the divine nature not through the lens of the outside world
but directly through inward contemplation.104 That such a visionary state
could be induced by prayer in front of a painted image might seem contra-
dictory, but if the painted image is instead understood as interchangeable
with the host – as the rubric suggests – the paradox recedes.105 Indeed, in
an early fourteenth-century manuscript from England, the ofice Matthew
Paris attributes to Innocent III is illustrated by a depiction of the elevation,
rather than of the Holy Face.106
The Eucharistic signiicance of the Holy Face transcended iconography;
both the Mandylion-type and the bust-length type were used in similar
places to roughly the same effect. More often than not, representations of
the Holy Face appear without the ofice of Innocent III or any other text
speciic to the Roman cult but instead in association with the psalm texts.
In the Barlow Psalter, dated between 1321 and 1341, from Peterborough,
a clypeus in the frame of the Beatus initial features the disembodied Holy
Face, perhaps referring to the exegetical understanding of Psalm 1:4, “Not
so the wicked . . . but like the dust, which the wind driveth from the face of
the earth.”107 Augustine glosses this as a reference to Adam’s futile attempt
to hide “from the Face of God” after the Fall; the Holy Face, as it appears
here, seems to remind the reader that sin cannot be hidden from the view
of God, and also that in his sacriice, reenacted in the Eucharist, Christ
redeemed the Fall.108 Later in the same manuscript, the bust-length por-
trait appears in the initial to Psalm 101(fol. 116v), which implores God,
“Turn not away thy face from me,” in the third verse; the same association
between Holy Face and Psalm 101 is found elsewhere, for example in the
East Anglian Longleat Breviary, dated 1316–1322.109 This association
with Psalm 101 is important because this is also a popular location for
early depictions of the book owner at prayer, as Isa Ragusa has pointed
out.110 Furthermore, the Eucharistic signiicance of Psalm 101 was well
established in medieval liturgy and commentary: as early as Augustine, its
ifth verse, “my heart is withered: because I forgot to eat my bread,” was
understood as speciically referring to the Eucharist, according to Jesus’s
statement in John 6:41, “I am the living bread which came down from
heaven.”111 Thus the psalm contains a reference both to the face of God
and to the Eucharist, making it the ideal placement for the image of the
Holy Face, in any iconographic guise.
The question remains as to whether these Holy Faces were speciically
understood as equivalent or similar to the Veronica or as universalized man-
ifestations of the miraculously visible “seal” of the invisible face of God. In
the very early German example (after 1234) from a Dominican-inluenced
Psalter for a laywoman identiied by Jeffrey Hamburger, the Holy Face
(bust-portrait style) appears in the initial D to Psalm 26, a text bursting
with references to both the face of the Lord and the face (and head) of
the Psalmist himself.112 Hamburger sees this as an early manifestation of
visual interest in the Veronica, and while this may be the case, nothing
positively asserts such an identity with the Roman object. It seems to me
that the language of the text alone might suggest to an artist familiar with
the ever more widely available Byzantine true-image icons the possibility
of using a bust of Christ at this point. Furthermore, Paul Binski’s thought
that Matthew Paris sometimes extracted “dramatic close-ups” from such
full-length subjects as the Christus patiens has some resonance here – led by
the text, the artist may have cropped a more traditional Maiestas to focus on
the face alone.113 Rather than limiting the subject of this initial to an artist’s
desire to reproduce the appearance of the almost invisible object in Rome,
I would place it within the wider current of interest in the face of Christ
as a visionary topos and a visible sign of the relationship between the soul
and God. This is a psalm that concludes with the afirmative statement, “I
believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living. Expect
the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the
Lord” (Psalm 26:13–14). The initial, in presenting a miniature vision of the
true face of God, conirms the hope expressed in the text: the reader “sees”
the Lord “in the land of the living,” within the very pages of her book.
Even before Matthew Paris’s showier effort to work the Holy Face free
from Roman control of the Veronica, and also before the slightly later
Continental experiments of the Bonmont Psalter and the Psalter-Hours
“of Yolande of Soissons,” the makers of books for women’s devotion were
interested in and engaged with the potential of the Holy Face in and of
itself, apart from any immediate association with the Roman object. The
urge toward visionary, self-transcending experience inculcated by the
Bonmont and Yolande examples may already have been present in these
early forays, though the theological and devotional implications were not
fully worked out. Importantly, almost all of the examples I have discussed
in this section of the chapter come from books that also include depictions
of their owners: in the German-Dominican example, the owner’s praying
image occurs in the initial to Psalm 101 (fol. 69v), while in the Bonmont
Psalter, a miniature depicts the patron, Abbot Walter, kneeling within the
frame of a picture of the seated Virgin and Child, and a black-robed nun,
kneeling beneath the frame, her head overlapping its lower border (fol. 8).
In the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons, the correlation between the
depiction of the praying owner at the opening of matins of the Virgin and
the Holy Face is even stronger, as both images are contained in similar
architectural frames, and both lirt with the boundaries between depiction
and vision.
Another aspect of the Holy Face, both in its bust-portrait and Mandylion-
style manifestations, is that not only does it open the door to imaginative
contemplation of the inal vision of God from the perspective of the soul,
it also reminds the viewer of God’s omniscient vision; the notion that God’s
vision is total and encompassing, that nothing escapes it, was central to the
moral universe of late medieval people. Dallas Denery, investigating mor-
alizing treatises on optics, remarks on “the total visibility that deines us
all” in relation to the divine.114 The viewer of the book, in identifying with
the Holy Face, in forming herself or himself to its pattern, in a sense also
identiies with this aspect of divine vision, which might just allow a glimpse
back into her or his own soul. This ability to see clearly within oneself was
not, Denery points out, generally assumed to be the case in the Middle
Ages – to the contrary, complete self-knowledge was impossible, except
through the eyes of God.115 So, in a sense, the image of the Holy Face, as
the object of devotional attention, became a tool or a technique for seeing
the self, a speculum for the soul.116
Probably the best example of the relexive, or mirroring, quality inher-
ent in images of the Holy Face comes from the fragmentary remains of the
Psalter of Robert de Lisle (British Library, MS Arundel 83 II), in which
the subject is incorporated into a number of theological diagrams intended
for the education and spiritual advancement of a lay viewer. The diagrams
belong to a visual tradition of didactic images in which fundamental theo-
logical precepts are communicated through a combination of rhyming tex-
tual cues and highly allegorizing pictures, known as the Speculum Theologie,
ascribed to the Franciscan John of Metz, and dating, as an ensemble, to
about 1275–1300.117 The reasons for the inclusion of this group of dia-
grams in the Psalter of Robert de Lisle can only be hypothesized – as a
literate and devout layman who ultimately gave up his considerable wealth
and entered the Franciscan order, he was probably someone with a genuine
interest in developing his spiritual self and building his intellectual under-
standing of theological subjects by means of the visual study of a “mirror”
of theology. The contemplative aim of such diagrams, which encourage
extended meditation through complex text-image, iconographic, and spa-
tial relationships, was well suited to the temperament and needs of such a
person.118 He left the book to his daughters who were Gilbertine sisters,
indicating that its contents were also deemed appropriate for female and
monastic viewers. The artist of Robert de Lisle’s version of this set of dia-
grams departed from the standard model for several of them, introducing
more pictorial (rather than diagrammatic) content and altering the basic
schema for structuring the visual and textual information. In particular, the
artist included two diagrams as circular forms, and gave bodily substance
to two vertically branching diagrams by adding human heads to them.119
Signiicantly, in all four transformations or additions, the Holy Face plays
an important role.
In each instance, it functions slightly differently in relation to the texts
and images that surround it, but always it introduces an element of mir-
roring and self-relection, drawing attention to both the activity of viewing
and the visibility of the viewer. Although this is probably not what Lucy
Sandler was thinking of when she wrote that “the De Lisle Psalter could
also be considered . . . as a social mirror,”120 the sense that the manuscript
relects back at its viewer his or her own identity is implicit in her state-
ment. The irst two instances of the Holy Face engage particularly actively
in relection. They occur in diagrams that encourage the viewer to con-
template his or her own mortality in terms of the human journey through
life, and at the same time they speciically invoke vision in their texts and
evoke the experience of gazing into the mirror in self-examination in their
format. The second two examples feature the disembodied face of Christ
in a more peculiar way, making visible the theological notion of Christ as
the physical head of the Christian body while also placing the viewer in an
odd spatial and bodily relationship to the Holy Face. This is another sort
of mirroring, and one that can best be understood only in conjunction with
the irst two images.
The Wheel of the Twelve Attributes of Human Existence (Figure 10), a rep-
resentation unique in this circular form to the De Lisle Psalter, presents
a radiating diagram with text arranged in twenty-ive spokelike subdivi-
sions emanating from a central circular image of the bust-type Holy Face
and terminating (with one exception at the top center) in smaller circles
10. The Wheel

of the Twelve
Attributes of
Human Existence,
De Lisle
Psalter, England
(London?),
1310–1320
(British Library,
MS Arundel
83 II, fol. 126).
© The British
Library Board
containing tituli that indicate either a query made by Reason or a response

on the part of a representative of one of the twelve attributes (essentially
developmental stages in human life, from birth to death).121 This circular
diagram is bounded by a simple square frame, and in the four corner spaces
left between the diagram and the frame, the symbols of the evangelists
appear, holding identifying banderoles. Although the Holy Face at the cen-
ter of the diagram can hardly hold a banderole (not having any depicted
hands), it, too, speaks: in the ring around the outer boundaries of the halo
and bust, a rubric identiies the speaker as the Holy Trinity and declares, “I
place all things in order: I create all: I bestow all.”122 The couplet seems to
refer to both the diagram itself and to God’s omniscient and all-seeing role
as the triune Creator. Not only does the Holy Face depicted at the center
of the diagram embody and speak for the Trinity, it puts everything in its
proper relation to everything else and bestows on the viewer (whomever
he or she may be) the orderly vision of human life encoded in the diagram.
In short, it presents the viewer with a relection of God’s perception of his

or her life.
This creates tension between the experience of the real physical and men-
tal effort required to decode the diagram and the complete, transtemporal
visibility of the spiritual subject to God. The dialectic between human and
divine vision is also evident in the text of the top-center spoke, which serves
as an introduction to the dialogue between Reason and the conditions of
human existence in the remaining spokes. This titulus announces, “Here
Reason speaks that it may appear [videatur] to man what he is, what he was,
and what he is to be” (my emphasis).123 In Latin, the verb videre, used as a
passive subjunctive in a subordinate clause of causation as it is here, means
to seem or to be seen, but it bears keeping in mind that in its active sense,
for example, in the indicative, it means to see, so like the image itself, it
refers both to the active and the passive visual presence of the spectator as
both the seeing and the seen. Just as in a mirror’s relection the viewer is
both the seeing and the seen, so it is in this diagram; the text indicates that
the speculum is more than a metaphor here – it is a material reality.
Because this is the only known diagram of the Twelve Attributes to take
this circular form rather than the form of a treelike or columnar chart,
its very composition is worth examining in view of its emphasis on vision
and relexivity. Mirror cases such as that from Paris circa 1320, now in the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London, quite often share the diagram’s
circle-in-square format (Figure 11). Such cases were usually carved of
ivory, but sometimes they were elaborately worked in gold or bronze and
enamel. As in the diagram, the circular ield of the mirror case is framed by
bestial elements, but whereas the tetramorphs in the diagram conirm the
scriptural authority of the written words they frame, the igures framing
the mirror case are hybridized, transgressive, and even a little threaten-
ing. They belong to the world of sensual pleasure and fantasy the mirrors’
backs also evoke. Such mirrors, after all, were not only the tools of femi-
nine grooming but potent signs of feminine sexuality and the particularly
feminine sins of lust and vanity.
The format of the diagram takes some of its meaning from the con-
trast between the self-absorbed carnal and sexualized gaze encouraged by
actual mirrors and the spiritual gaze, with its Christ-centered awareness,
suggested by the texts and the placement of the Holy Face at the center.
On the other hand, it would be oversimplifying to say that actual mirrors,
in opposition to spiritual “mirrors” such as this, were strictly amoral or
sensual in their orientation. On the ivory mirror case in the Victoria and
Albert Museum, a male lover kneels, offering up his heart in the form of
a pumpkinseed-shaped object to a lady, who crowns him with a circular
chaplet while, to the left, the igure of a groom raises a lail over the head
11. The lover 0ffers his heart, mirror case, ivory,

France, irst quarter fourteenth century (London,
Victoria and Albert Museum). © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London
of two horses. Michael Camille gives a perceptive reading of this relief, in

which he glosses the offering of the heart as analogous to the elevation of
the Host, with the lady’s body as an altar on which the lover’s suffering
and sacriice are likened to those of Christ; the groom beating the horses
becomes a visual metaphor for the taming of “animal passions.” He notes,
however, that a more carnal and “lascivious” reading was simultaneously
available to the medieval viewer; here the heart becomes a metonym for
the male organ, the chaplet a sign for the woman’s sexual and reproduc-
tive body.124 Meanwhile, Alcuin Blamires views the gift of the heart as a
direct reference to the Adoration of the Magi but observes that this func-
tions at least as much to elevate the emotional character of profane love
in terms of self-abnegation and sacriice.125 The coexistence of these very
different modes of interpretation in fact works synergistically: even as the
viewer becomes more stirred up by the carnal implications of the image,
she is also chastened by the reminder of the necessity to substitute bodily
satisfaction of desire with the spiritualized, incorporeal pleasures of alle-
gory, Christian mystery, and contemplation of Christ. The romance of the
soul and the body are inextricably tied together, despite their apparent
incompatibility.
A further point of comparison between the secular mirror and the De

Lisle diagram of the Twelve Attributes has to do with the relective proper-
ties of the two. Extant fourteenth-century mirror cases almost never retain
their original relective surface, but archeological evidence suggests that
most of them contained convex glass backed by lead.126 The glass used typ-
ically had a faint coloration – somewhat greenish – and was marred by small
bubbles, which along with the curvature of the surface led to relections
that were slightly distorted and uneven.127 This gives some sense of how a
late medieval reader would have understood the Pauline invocation of the
mirror as a metaphor for an obscured and partial vision. In contrast, the
“mirror” of human existence in the Twelve Attributes diagram possesses a
kind of crystalline clarity: the black words are written on the light-colored
ground of the bare parchment, relecting not a transitory appearance of
a human face but a universal account of human life, in which the many
instants and varieties of experience are compressed into one rationally
ordered space. Furthermore, the face that appears at the center of this true
image of existence is painted in exceptionally light tones, its paleness draw-
ing the eye to its unlinching gaze and severe expression. Against the muted
red and dark blue of the nimbus, the Holy Face almost pulsates with light.
For a medieval viewer, the physical similarities of the diagram with con-
temporary mirrors, and the differences between the kinds of relections
they offered, would have been spiritually illuminating and even a little jolt-
ing. Imagine looking into a mirror and having the relection within speak
to you, claim subjecthood superior to your own, and make you the object of
its gaze.128 Furthermore, the effect of interior luminosity in the Holy Face,
set in its roundel and surrounded by the radiating spokes and secondary
roundels of text, connects to the experience of viewing the glass of a Gothic
rose window. The great thirteenth-century rose windows of Westminster
Abbey would probably have been familiar to Robert de Lisle, a frequent
inhabitant of London during his service to Edward II and Edward III.129 In
particular, the north rose, which Robert Branner suggested was originally
quite close to the north transept rose at Notre Dame in Paris, may have
borne a striking resemblance to the Twelve Attributes diagram with its
circular central element and radiating spokes terminating in roundels.130
Furthermore, framing the exterior of the south transept rose at Amiens
(late thirteenth century), one inds a series of human igures entwined in
the sculpted foliage, ascending on the left to a throned igure on the verti-
cal axis, then tumbling down head irst toward the lower right – the Wheel
of Fortune. Clearly, the circular form was particularly hospitable to such
allegorizations. As Naomi Kline points out in her work on the Hereford
Map, circular diagrams were a popular subject for interior wall paintings
in England, both in religious and secular buildings, so the move from an
actual window to a painted “window” would probably have been a comfort-

able cognitive maneuver for the viewers of the De Lisle diagrams.131
By analogy to other recognizable visual forms, the Twelve Attributes dia-
gram takes on a range of implications that link it to the visible, tactile world
in which its viewer exists. At the same time, it engages the eye and the mind
on another more spiritual plane. Helen Dow’s classic study on the rose win-
dow demonstrated how in its symbolic aspect it called to mind such vision-
ary passages of Scripture as Ezekiel’s vision of the tetramorphs (Ezekiel
1:13–21), glossed by medieval authorities as a vision of the Incarnation.132
Thus, the diagram, calling to mind the luminosity and form of the rose
window, also calls to mind the immediacy of the Incarnation, and the
immanence of the visual encounter with God, who, in any case, already
sees all. Once more, the Holy Face takes on Eucharistic implications and
suggests a spiritual and visual communion.133
The all-seeing vision of God as opposed to the transience of human
life and sensual pleasure is also the subject of the second circular diagram
in the Psalter of Robert de Lisle (Figure 12). The Wheel of the Ten Ages
of Man, on the verso of the same folio as the Twelve Attributes, iterates
the Holy Face as the center of a radiating composition – again, a version
of the diagram unique to this manuscript.134 Like the Twelve Attributes
Holy Face, this example conforms to the bust-length type popularized by
Matthew Paris, but unlike the image on the other side of the parchment,
this face lacks the upper edge of the garment and the disk of red behind
the blue cruciform halo. In effect, it has been cropped slightly, so that the
top of Christ’s head touches the innermost circumference of the roundel
that displays the speaking text. The treatment of the hair, beard, and facial
features employs softer lines and lighter colors but conforms to the shape,
size, and placement of the image on the other side of the folio. The two
diagrams’ relationship might be understood as parallel to that between the
two aspects of a rose window; viewed from the outside, the rose empha-
sizes an abstract pattern of radiating forms, and from the inside, an icon-
ographic program. Adding to this effect in the relationship between the
two diagrams is the way that the main content of the irst comes in the
form of the texts contained by the spokes, while in the second these spokes
are illed in with alternating red and blue patterned grounds that strongly
call to mind the secondary ields of stained glass. Meanwhile, the primary
material of the second diagram appears in the outer roundels in the form
of emblematic pictures of the stages of human life from infancy to death
in old age, accompanied by inscriptions that run around the outer border
of each roundel and give voice to each of these ages. Finally, the second
diagram repeats the simple square frame of the irst, and in place of the
tetramorphs depicts personiications of Childhood, Youth, Maturity, and
12. Wheel of
the Ten Ages of
Man, De Lisle
Psalter, England
(London?),
1310–1320
(British Library,
MS Arundel
83 II, fol. 26v).
©The British
Library Board
Old Age in the four corners. Although the two images don’t line up exactly
from recto to verso, the effect of turning the page is like that of moving
from an exterior to an interior view of a rose window.
In calling on visual recognition of stained-glass design, the artists and
designers of this manuscript prod the viewer to engage in the kind of con-
templative and potentially visionary absorption the rose window seems to
have been designed to encourage. Particularly if the viewer used his prayer
book in the context of attendance at the Mass, as was commonplace, the
visual similarities between glass and page would have been more evident.
Just as the window both draws the eye and focuses the divine light on the
churchgoer in a visible reiication of God’s gaze, the diagrams in the book
operate along a two-way axis. The viewer trains his bodily gaze on the
diagram, and the diagram, seemingly transparent as window glass, looks
back. The inscription that encircles the Holy Face in the Ten Ages diagram
draws attention to its subjectivity not only as speaker but also as viewer: “I
see all at once: I govern all by my plan.”135 The mortal viewer is confronted
with a gaze that encompasses his whole life, the temporal constraints of
human perception not applying to God’s vision. Briely privileged by his
communion with this penetrating and totalizing look, he is able to see him-
self whole, from the tender infant seated in his mother’s lap before a warm
ire, to the kingly man of his prime, to an expiring corpse on its deathbed,
and even beyond, to his tomb.
The contrast between this spiritual vision and ordinary visual percep-
tion is deepened in the diagram’s texts and pictures. For adolescence (the
third age), the image of a boy looking into a mirror and combing his hair
reminds the viewer of the mirroring aspect of his own devotional activity,
and the text, which remarks “A suitable life for the world is judged in a mir-
ror,”136 implies that the adolescent, like the devotional subject, sees only
darkly, not directly. However, in the lower of youth, pictured as a mounted
huntsman with a hawk on his ist, “Rather than the image in the mirror,
life itself is delightful.”137 Situated between two images of regal manhood
(the personiication of “Juventus” in the upper left corner and the roundel
at the top center of the diagram, featuring man’s prime as kingship), this
would seem to be a cheerful image of youth. However, in the larger context
of the diagram, it takes on a grimmer, more cautionary note: the leeting
nature of this happiness is emphasized by the dominance of images of help-
lessness, foolishness, deterioration, and death in the other roundels. Only
the sweet and innocent baby on his mother’s lap, and the stern king at the
top of the diagram, really offer any similarly bright outlook for human life.
The two images of childhood are each bleak in their way. The young child
balances a scale, proclaiming, “I will never perish; I measure my age.”138
The irst part of the statement is patently false when viewed in the context
of a diagram that maps the inevitable decline unto death, while the second
calls to mind images of the judgment of souls. The older child, gazing in
the mirror and combing his hair, quotes the iconography of the vices of
vanity, lust, and idleness. Meanwhile, after that kingly moment in the prime
of his life, the man rapidly descends into debility, irst leaning on a staff and
dressed in the penitential garb of a pilgrim, then hunched and blind, led
along by a small boy, and inally, reclining on his bed as a priest administers
last rites. The inal two roundels dwell on his funeral and his tomb.
In the roundels, both text and image work to remind the viewer that his
mortal life, and the body through which he experiences it, are prisoners
of time. Likewise, the body’s temporal, physical vision is unreliable, per-
haps leading the older child into sin, the young man into the seductions
of pleasure-seeking, and abandoning the old man altogether. Against this
presentation of the perils of bodily vision, the implacable gaze of the Holy
Face returns the viewer to the realm of the sacred, and to the encounter that
will come, he hopes, at the end of his life, when he sees God face to face
rather than in a diffuse and dificult image similar to that in a contemporary
convex mirror. The two diagrams depicting the nature of mortal experience
engage in intricate play with visual references to such other objects as the
ivory-backed mirrors favored by aristocrats for their personal grooming and
the rose window. In this play, they destabilize their identity as pictures, con-
ceived and manufactured by human beings, and seek to stir the soul toward
another level of perception, mimetic of the yearned-for encounter with a
direct vision of God imagined in the central depiction of the Holy Face.
The two remaining instances of the Holy Face in the Psalter of Robert de
Lisle visually and conceptually occupy a different space than the centrally
planned diagrams of the Twelve Attributes and the Ten Ages. Incorporated
into diagrams of the Twelve Articles of the Faith (Figure 13) and the Tree of
Virtues (Figure 14), these small-scale Holy Faces surmount vertically orga-
nized structures, springing from the uppermost point of the diagram and
breaking almost entirely free of the rectangular frame. In the Articles of
the Faith diagram, the bust-length Holy Face serves as an oddly natural-
istic head to a diagrammatic body: a central column of twelve roundels
contains abbreviated texts of the Twelve Articles of the Faith. From these
emerge symmetrical pairs of rays that slant downward at about a 45-degree
angle, connecting the articles to two additional columns of roundels at the
diagram’s edge. On the left, these roundels name prophets whose texts,
inscribed in the rays, igure the relevant article. On the right, each of the
apostles is named, in association with the text that ties him to the con-
nected article. Thus the body of Christ – the Church – takes the form of
its core tenets supported by its most authoritative and divinely inspired
words. Similarly, in the diagram of the Tree of Virtues, the head of Christ
surmounts a body made up of the symmetrical, branching diagram of the
Virtues, so that in effect all of these qualities, and all of the human efforts
to embody them, are incorporated into the body of Christ.
Both of these diagrams invite a different sort of bodily and spiritual perfor-
mance than the contemplative, visionary absorption and physical engagement
encouraged by the Twelve Attributes and the Ten Ages. Whereas the texts
in the irst pair require a physical engagement in order to become legible –
either the book must be turned or the reader must move about the book – the
texts in this second pair read in a more or less standard left-to-right direc-
tion (albeit up and down on the angled rays of the Articles of the Faith and
organized into oblong clusters of leaves or fruits in the Tree of Virtues). The
relationship to the viewer’s body in the second pair is more intellectualized
or abstract; instead of requiring the body’s participation, the diagrams draw
attention to the body itself, asking the viewer to consider the relationship of
his or her physical body to the highly allegorized body depicted on the page.
13. Twelve
Articles of the
Faith, De Lisle
Psalter, England
(London?),
1310–1320
(British Library,
MS Arundel
83 II, fol. 128).
©The British
Library Board
14. Tree of Virtues, De Lisle Psalter, England (London?),

1310–1320 (British Library, MS Arundel 83 II, fol. 129).
©The British Library Board
The compressed narrative image at the bottom of the Articles of the

Faith diagram makes this point especially strongly. It depicts the contrast-
ing fates of the leper, Lazarus, and the wealthy man, Dives. Both lie dead.
A pair of angels wings down from the depicted heaven to extract the naked
soul of Lazarus and carry him to his reward – he sits, naked and diminutive,
in the lap of a small Christ in Majesty who appears immediately under the
lowest of the central roundels, labeled “Vita eterna.” On the right, how-
ever, Dives’s soul is ripped from his mouth by a pair of hairy, bestial dev-
ils, compatriots, no doubt, of a third devil, who beats a soul – probably
Dives – down into the fanged maw of Hell, immediately beneath the feet
of the majestic Christ. This tidy parable underscores the physical body’s
mortality and reminds the viewer that the preservation of his own soul, and
ultimately of his resurrected body, depends on his embrace of the articles
of faith, that body of knowledge required for full, eternal embodiment in
heaven, depicted at the top of the diagram, to either side of and below the
Holy Face, in the form of the seated Prophets and Apostles. The whole
diagram becomes a igure for the resurrected body of Christ at the time of
Judgment, the body attached to the divine face all souls yearn to see.
15. Tree of Vices, De Lisle Psalter, England (London?),

1310–1320 (British Library, MS Arundel 83 II, fol.
128v). ©The British Library Board
The identiication between Christ’s eternal, divine body, with which the
souls of the deceased will be reunited at the end of time, and his human,
leshly body is also made in the Tree of Virtues diagram. The base of the
branching, sinuous Tree of Virtues springs from a gilded vase. That the
vase serves as a igure for the virgin womb of Mary is unquestionable: it is
lanked on either side by small, graceful igures of Gabriel and the Virgin at
the moment of the Annunciation, a subject identiied in a titulus as “Radix
virtutum. Humilitas” (The root of all virtues: Humility). Thus, the tree
that is the allegorized body of Christ, surmounted by the visionary image
of his face, is shown to be a lesh-and-blood body as well, of woman born.
This humanity that encompasses the seven virtues and all their subsidiary
attributes poses a challenge to the body of the viewer: can it, too, incorpo-
rate all these fruits of the Holy Spirit? This challenge is particularly strong
given that it is viewed directly across the opening from the Tree of Vices – a
similar composition that springs from the ground of Eden, where Adam
and Eve sin, and culminates in a speckled moth in place of the Holy Face
(Figure 15). In medieval texts, the moth was most often associated with
Tineola bisselliella, the clothing or webbing moth, whose appetite for textiles
might here be glossed as the destructive effects of the vices on the veil of
lesh that is the body.139
Where the irst pair of diagrams that employ the Holy Face in the
Psalter of Robert de Lisle uses relection, transparency, and illumination
as tools for achieving a transcendental, visionary state mimetic of the true
vision experienced only by and through God, the second pair asks view-
ers to engage with the embodied nature of Christ and to understand their
own bodies in terms of the allegorical structures on the page. Both uses of
the Holy Face coincide with strands of interpretation and implementation
found in the earlier examples. The visionary, contemplative aspects of both
Matthew’s and the continental works come strongly to the fore in the cir-
cular diagrams, while the emphasis on the identity between Christ’s body,
the Eucharist, and the Holy Face, found particularly in the Yolande exam-
ple and some of the Psalter initials, emerges in an inventive and visually
challenging form in the vertically oriented diagrams. This demonstrates
that by the middle of the irst quarter of the fourteenth century, the Holy
Face had currency as a multivalent image that could be marshaled to a
variety of devotional effects. It had entered the critical awareness of artists
and their audiences in such a way as to constitute a potent and versatile
talisman for spiritual growth and transformation. While the Roman cult
of the Veronica continued to lourish and expand throughout this period,
and no doubt continued to play a role in the way people looked at and
understood the Holy Face, the image itself had attained a level of sophisti-
cation and independence that allowed the devotional gaze to interact with
it and in this interaction shape the soul of the devotee. This is where the
link between the Holy Face and the relexive depiction of the book owner
lies: both essentially are heuristics for seeing the true, or spiritual, self. In
a belief system that gives only the Divine the privilege of clear, uncon-
strained vision, in which the individual human being has only partial access
to self-knowledge, seeing as God sees becomes an imperative for spiritual
advancement.
All these images indicate a growing fascination with the depiction of
the Holy Face as an opportunity to explore the notion of God as a mirror
of the self – an idea with deep roots in medieval exegesis.140 This thirst
for inward, personal experiences that bring the individual into corporeal
and spiritual unity with the godhead shaped many devotional practices of
the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries but also shaped the outward
forms of theology and liturgy. For example, the feast of Corpus Christi,
a celebration of the Eucharist, had its roots in the intensely emotional,
mystical, and embodied rhetoric of devotion centered around female ig-
ures in thirteenth-century Liège, as Miri Rubin has shown.141 Not inci-
dentally, Jacques Pantaléon, who as papal chancellor sent the Sainte Face to
his sister’s Cistercian nunnery near Soissons, was closely involved with the
institution and promotion of the feast, both as archdeacon of Campines,
in the diocese of Liège, and as Pope Urban IV. His emphasis, in his letter
to his sister, on the Eucharistic, devotional aspect of the Sainte Face is of
a piece with his interest in the promulgation of oficial, liturgical inno-
vations that drew attention to the Eucharist. However, while Urban was
able to issue a bull instituting the feast of Corpus Christi just prior to his
death, it took another half-century, and the actions of another pope, John
XXII, to conirm the feast’s universality.142 Rubin noted that John’s inter-
est in the feast stemmed in part from his desire to “revitalise the symbolic
system” of the faith.143 A little more than a decade after his promulgation
of the feast of Corpus Christi, John became embroiled in the controversy
over the beatiic vision, which Caroline Bynum has aptly described as “the
inal episode in medieval discussions of the ontological and soteriologi-
cal importance of the body.”144 In the remainder of this chapter, I look at
the intersection of this controversy with the visual interests and pictorial
ideas advanced by the Holy Face as it gained purchase in the repertoire
of devotional images circulating in private prayer books in the fourteenth
century.
Portrait as Proof: The Holy Face and the Visio Dei

Controversy
In the winter of 1331–1332, John XXII preached a series of sermons

in which he addressed the condition of the souls of the blessed and the
damned. These four sermons were to stir up a controversy that involved
not only the leading theologians of the day but also the king and queen
of France (Philip VI Valois and Jeanne de Bourgogne), the king of Sicily
and Jerusalem (Robert of Anjou), and John’s avowed enemies, the Spiritual
Franciscans and Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria.145 Departing from earlier
statements in which he had suggested that the saints, at least, enjoyed the
fully realized vision of the divine nature of Christ as soon as they died,
he laid out a disturbing argument: the souls of the dead, both the blessed
and the damned, would not receive the full measure of either their reward
or their punishment until after the Second Coming and the Judgment.146
He claimed that this view, though it departed from the unoficial consen-
sus that the beatiic vision was instantly available to the holy dead, was
in fact grounded in Scripture and patristic writings – an assertion that
was problematic given contradictions within the sources he and his sup-
porters cited.147 Reaction to John’s position was strongly negative; there
were accusations of heresy from John’s enemies, and only slightly milder
expressions of disapprobation from his usual allies. Although John declared

himself willing to hear further disputes on the subject, and that he was
open to persuasion, he irmly quashed opposition, imprisoning the English
Dominican Thomas Waleys on charges of heresy and bringing his own
specially appointed theological expert, Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, under
investigation by the Inquisition when he could not be brought to support
the pope’s position.
Deiant in the face of criticism by the doctors of the University of Paris,
John held to his views, and perhaps went to his grave still convinced of
them. However, he did issue a deathbed statement indicating that it was
up to the Church to make the ultimate doctrinal decision on the matter,
and that if in any way his views contradicted that decision, they should be
dismissed from the record.148 Still, he conceded the beatiic vision to the
souls of the dead only insofar as the souls’ perception of the beatiic vision
was compatible with their status as separated (that is, not rejoined with
their resurrected bodies), which is another way of saying, in his view, not
completely. Bynum noted that this hedging was in fact in keeping with a
general fourteenth-century uncertainty about whether the intensity of the
beatiic vision increased after bodily resurrection.149 The question was in
fact left open by John’s successor, Benedict XII, when he issued his deini-
tive statement on the matter, the bull “Benedictus Deus,” in January 1336
(cited in the epigraph to this chapter). Instead, he emphasized only the
resolution of the central issue: yes, the souls of the dead went immedi-
ately (mox) to their reward or punishment, and yes, the blessed enjoyed
“plainly, clearly, and openly” and “face to face” the vision of the divine. And
although all souls would be called to Judgment at the Resurrection, they
need not wait for the moment of reunion with their bodies to partake of
their just deserts.150
This brief account of the controversy leaves out some of the more color-
ful and inventive expressions of strongly held opinions on both sides of the
issue, and glosses over the machinations of theologians, prelates, monas-
tic leaders, and secular princes, whose motivations for engagement in the
debate were not always purely spiritual. Important here is how central the
question of physical, bodily vision becomes to the debate, and that the dis-
cussion is focused on the relationship between bodily and spiritual seeing
and the distinction between the incarnate and divine natures of Christ. To
the question of whether the disembodied soul can experience the beatiic
vision is attached an implicit corollary: can the soul encumbered by its not-
yet-perfected body also attain this vision, if only momentarily? Although
any standard theological response would have to begin with Paul’s dic-
tum about our necessarily darkened and partial vision in 1 Corinthians
13:12, artistic responses to the question resonate with another Pauline
formulation: “But we all beholding the glory of the Lord with open face,
are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of
the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Lucy Sandler has shown how in at least one instance a direct artistic
response to the beatiic vision controversy can be identiied.151 Although
it dates to the 1360s, thirty years after the conclusion of the debate by the
promulgation of “Benedictus Deus,” the idiosyncratic English encyclope-
dia known as the Omne Bonum (British Library MS Royal 6 E VI) includes
several illustrations that invoke the Holy Face. One of these indeed illus-
trates the text of “Benedictus Deus” itself. This picture, as Sandler notes, is
perhaps a little uncertain theologically. A large, frontal, disembodied face
of Christ is lanked by four groups of praying igures: kneeling laymen
and swooping angels on the left, kneeling laywomen and more swooping
angels on the right. The clothing on the kneeling igures, Sandler points
out, indicates that they should be read as living people, not dead souls, who
are ordinarily shown as naked.152 To judge by their gestures and the focus
of their attention on the large, central image, these igures not only afirm
their belief but experience it. Sandler goes on to illuminate how the artist
of the Omne Bonum used the Holy Face to invoke different types of vision-
ary experiences and contemplative performances. Further, she frames these
visual practices within the context of the admiration of the book’s compiler,
James le Palmer, for Richard Fitzralph, a key participant in the debate of
the 1330s and one particularly committed to the idea of immediacy in the
beatiic vision.153
One-to-one relationships between visual expression and historical event
are rare in the Middle Ages, and the suggestion, in the illustration of the
“Benedictus Deus” text, that the living Christians are actually experiencing
the beatiic vision demonstrates how even when such direct cause-and-
effect relationships exist, the slippage between word and image allows a
fair amount of distance to open between the oficial, textual account and
its pictorial partner. In fact, several other instances of post-1332 pictorial
invocations of the Holy Face point toward a situation in which the debate
itself has raised, rather than shut down, the possibility that the image might
function as a kind of scrying glass in which the living devotional subject
approaches the experience of the beatiic vision. Indeed, the appearance of
the face can often serve as a marker of visionary experiences depicted or
implied elsewhere on the folio, or within the book at large.
In the Book of Hours made for Yolande of Flanders after 1353, attrib-
uted to the workshop of Jean and Bourgot le Noir, the Holy Face makes
two appearances.154 Both of these, in very different ways, draw atten-
tion both to the act of looking at a material object and to the movement
beyond physical vision into the realm of the visionary. The irst of these,
16. Attributed to
Jean and Bourgot
le Noir, leaf
from the Hours
of Yolande of
Flanders, Paris,
ca. 1353 (Oxford,
Bodleian Library
MS Bodley Y.6
Dep. A1). Photo
by permission
of the Ruskin
School of
Drawing and
Fine Art
a leaf now found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Figure 16), features
a woman – presumably the book’s original owner – kneeling in prayer
in the initial of Psalm 120, “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains.”
This psalm was a common location for the depiction of book owners, as
Adelaide Bennett has pointed out.155 This example contains an unexpected
element. As the depicted devotee raises her eyes in accordance with the
text, she gazes toward a peculiar apparition: a Mandylion-type Holy Face
that materializes in the upper right of the initial, surrounded by the wavy
white-and-blue cloud forms that denote revelation in manuscripts of this
period and style. Although this face is turned toward the praying igure of
the woman and not the viewer, its disembodied projection from the cloud
strongly indicates that it might be read as a manifestation of the Holy Face
and a premonition of the beatiic vision to come. Because Psalm 120 not
only speciically invokes the Psalmist’s (and thus the devotee’s) gaze but
also belongs to the group of the irst ive gradual psalms particularly asso-
ciated with commemoration of the dead, the appearance of a vision of the
Holy Face before the praying woman resonates with the promise of the
immanence of the beatiic vision for the holy dead.156
The other instance of the Holy Face in the Hours of Yolande of Flanders
makes direct reference to the Roman Veronica. At the opening of Lauds of
the Hours of the Virgin, a large, framed miniature depicts the Visitation;
beneath this, a three-line initial D partially encloses a scene of the book
owner at prayer, kneeling before an altar with a sculptural group of the
seated Virgin and Child (Figure 17). In the bas-de-page, the counterpoint
to the happy subject of the main miniature appears – Christ stands before
the high priest Caiphas, hunching his shoulders as he is accused, while
Peter, trailing “afar off” (as in Matthew 26:58), responds to a maidservant
who holds a lamp, referring to his three denials of Christ (the cock crowing
immediately over his head reinforces this). Four saints stand in the mar-
gins, two on each side of the main miniature, arranged vertically: on the
right, a headless bishop above and a virgin martyr below, and on the left, a
royal saint (perhaps Saint Louis) above and Saint Veronica below. Veronica
carries before her the cloth with the image of the Holy Face, associated
with her from the late thirteenth century forward.157
As an ensemble, the images on this folio emphasize themes of incarna-
tion and true vision and place them in opposition to mere carnality and
deception. The depiction of the Visitation stresses Mary’s pregnancy and
the presence of the incarnate God within her womb through the exag-
gerated curve of her posture and Elizabeth’s gesture of placing a hand on
Mary’s abdomen. Elizabeth’s pregnancy is downplayed by the way her body
forms a complementary curve to that of Mary, and by the dramatic swags of
her red cloak, but these two elements also help to close the space between
the two igures so that except for a narrow band of background between
them, they operate as a single compositional unit, stressing their common
purpose and identity as divinely chosen and miraculously impregnated
mothers. The two female saints who stand just outside the frame of this
affecting scene also exhibit the dramatic curvature of posture that causes
their abdomens to project forward, their chests to draw back, as if in a kind
of sympathetic fertility. This posture is characteristic of the style of these
17. Lauds of the Hours of the Virgin, The Hours of Yolande of Flanders, Paris, ca. 1353 (British Library, MS
Yates Thompson 27, f. 44av). © The British Library Board
Pucelle-inluenced artists, and at least one of the male igures above – the
bishop – also strikes a similar pose, but in contrast to the royal saint, in
whom the forward jut of the hips is much reduced, the female saints seem
to complement the emphasis on Mary’s pregnancy. In particular, Veronica’s
pose, in which she spreads her sudarium with its miraculously conceived
image on it in front of her own extremely rounded abdomen, ties into the
notion of the Holy Face as a species of true embodiment of Christ, equiv-
alent with his Incarnation and its reenactment in the Eucharist. This lends
support to Ewa Kuryluk’s view that Veronica with her cloth is an analogue
to Mary with her son, unborn, living, and dead, since textile metaphors
were themselves powerful signs for the Incarnation, for the Eucharist, and
for the relationship between the living body and the soul.158
The fertile, freestanding bodies of the Virgin and the female saints, and
the blithe masculinity of the royal saint’s assured pose, contrast with the
bas-de-page scene of Christ before Caiphas, which features clumps of
bodies, their limbs tightly clustered, their expressive and rather ugly faces
seeming to sprout like hydra heads from the mass of overlapping draperies
and costumes. Christ, clutching a gray shawl about his defensively raised
shoulders, looks uncertainly toward Caiphas, pig-faced on his throne. Peter,
a little apart from the group, toward the left, is equally unattractive, his
features compressed into an unnaturally limited space beneath a bulging
cranium. He recoils slightly from the aggressive gesture of the maidservant
with her lantern, whose body, in contrast to the women depicted above,
describes a strong, incurving arc, thrusting her head and shoulders toward
Peter, her waist and hips back toward the crowd to her right. The empty
space between them, an elongated oval interrupted only by her elbow, the
lantern, and Peter’s raised hand (half clenched, half open), vibrates with the
narrative implications of their gestures. She has asked if Peter knows Jesus,
and he has denied it. The falsity of this, its futility, may also be igured in
that oval shape, open at the top, reminiscent of the vase that symbolizes
Mary’s virgin womb, but this womblike space is empty and infertile.
The initial, with its image of the owner at prayer, falls between the two
major zones of the page, and its secondary or even tertiary status is implicit
in the smaller scale of its igures, but its lesser importance does not elimi-
nate it from the visual play. The kneeling, praying woman, her book open
on the prie-dieu before her, looks upward, though whether she gazes at
the sculptural group of the Virgin and Child on the altar before her or at
the scene of the Visitation above is unclear, just as the blessing gesture of
the Christ child in the sculptural group calls into question whether this
is a material image or an animate body, in a similar fashion to the owner
image in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons. In addition, a second
woman, behind the praying igure, sits on the ground and holds an open
book. The viewer is left to decide whether she is a maid or lady-in-waiting

following along with her mistress’s prayers or whether she is instead, as her
seated posture and lack of attention to the sacred subjects on view seem to
indicate, a igure for a different sort of reading and looking, one that is as
spiritually infertile as the empty space between the igure of the maidser-
vant, below her, and Peter. Her ambiguity may be intentionally provoking,
too: her reading draws attention to the book user’s visual activity and opens
the possibility that it needs to be assessed in its qualities of concentration
and devotion.
On this folio, the Holy Face, as it appears on Veronica’s sudarium, is
just one piece of a larger constellation of visual and iconographic cues cal-
culated to inspire critical self-awareness in the viewer, and from there to
lead into a meditation on the Incarnation and the sacred potential of the
body when it is in communion with God. Whereas the iconography of
Saint Veronica, which was just coming into vogue around the middle of
the fourteenth century, refers back to the object in Rome, the role that
object plays here seems to have less to do with its material speciicity and
more to do with its symbolic dimensions as a physical trace of Christ, and
its visionary implications, as a foreshadowing of the ultimate face-to-face
encounter. The book owner, training her devout gaze on sacred subjects,
turns her back on what might be understood as a personiication of secular
reading, and on the barren outcome of Peter’s denials of Christ. The live-
liness of the sculptural pair on the altar before her and the presence of the
Holy Face on the sudarium of Saint Veronica above her both point toward
the goal of her devotion, and suggest that just as Mary’s body is miracu-
lously imprinted with the body of Christ, as stressed in the Visitation, the
devotee’s vision might lead her to be imprinted with the image of the face
of Christ at the end of time.
Ultimately, the appeal of the Holy Face lay in its ability to facilitate this
intensely personal, visionary experience of the sacred through a strategy of
relection that inscribed the viewer within the sign of the face of Christ.
The metaphor of the seal’s impression on wax, joined to the metaphor of
the mirror, made a powerful case for the eficacy of the Holy Face as a
devotional image. In terms of medieval theories of vision and the develop-
ments in optics that took place over the course of the thirteenth century,
the operation of such an image on the interior state of its perceiver would
have been increasingly clear. Adopting reinements to Greek optical the-
ory pioneered by Islamic scientists, western European thinkers articulated
a newly comprehensive model of visual perception largely based on the
notion of intromission – the projection of energetic rays from points on
the body of a perceived object into the eye of the viewer.159 Unlike their
Islamic counterparts, these western writers also believed that the eye itself
participated in the process of visual perception, actively emitting rays of its

own that ixed on and drew in those external rays worthy of its vision.160
The net result of this dialectic between outward and inward rays was the
transformation of consciousness through the senses. The possibility that a
visual object could transform the very character of the mind that perceived
it became increasingly viable.161 To gaze on the Holy Face was to reform
the soul in its image, and to see oneself relected in a perfected state.
Authentic imprint of the divine seal, foretaste of beatiic vision,
Eucharistic sign, and true relection of the soul’s ideal state: the Holy
Face was all of these. This multivalence, at least as much as its association
with the Veronica in Rome or other related objects, made the Holy Face
a particularly appropriate subject for visual devotion. The disciplined gaze
could focus on it under a variety of viewing conditions, ranging from the
large-scale and very public performance of the Mass to the more intimate
context of giving religious instruction to a child. Its various meanings, each
complementary to the other, would take on new conigurations under each
performance of visual attention to it. In church, it could intensify the expe-
rience of seeing the Host elevated; in the relative quiet of one’s bedcham-
ber, it could facilitate the contemplation of the beatiic vision as an exercise
in spiritual reformation. Above all, the notion that the image gave access
to the ultimate visual assimilation of the self into the divine tied it to the
effort to see the self clearly as a relection of the incarnate Christ. And this
striving for transformation through vision was, in a word, devotion.
Appendix: The Text of the “Ofice of Innocent III” and

Ave facies praeclara
The text ascribed by Matthew Paris to Pope Innocent III appears in a num-
ber of thirteenth-century manuscripts. Here I present the versions that
appear in four manuscripts discussed in the chapter, the irst two associ-
ated with Matthew, the third in the Cistercian Bonmont Psalter, and the
fourth in the Psalter-Hours of Yolande of Soissons. For a more thorough
list of known manuscript witnesses (though not for a critical edition of
the text, which I do not believe exists at this time), see Solange Corbin de
Mangoux, “Les Ofices de la Sainte Face,” Bulletin des Études Portugaises n.s.
11 (1947): 1–65.
London, British Library, MS Arundel 157
1. Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui domine dedisti leticiam [sic] in
corde meo (Psalm 4:7)
2. Dominus misereatur
3. Pater noster
4. Fac mecum signum in bono et videant qui oderunt me et confundantur quo-
niam tu Domine adiuvasti me et consolatus es me (Psalm 85:17)
5. Ora pro nobis beata Veronica ut etcetera [later texts supply ut digni eficia-
mur, e.g. Aberdeen, University Library MS 25, fol. 73, 15th century]
6. Domine exaudi orationem meam et etcetera (Psalm 101:1)
7. Domine deus virtutum converte nos et ostende faciem tuam (Psalm 79:20)
8. Oremus: Deus qui nobis signatus lumine vultus tui memoriale tuum ad
instatiam Veronice sudario impressam ymaginem reliquere voluisti per pas-
sionem et crucem tuam tribue nobis quesumus ut nunc in terris per speculum
per [sic] in enigmate ipsam adorare et venerari valemus ut facie ad faciem
venientem iudicem te securi videamus. Qui vivis et regnans cum Deo patre
in unitate spiritus sanctus deus per omnia secula seculorum. Amen.
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 16, fol. 53v
1. Signatum est super nos (Psalm 4:7)
3. Gloria
4. Kyrie
5. Pater noster
6. Fac mecum signum in bono (Psalm 85:17)
7. Tibi dixit cor meum exquisivit facies mea faciem tuam Domine requiram
(Psalm 26:8)
8. Qu(a)erite dominum et conirmamini quaerite facium eius semper (Psalm
104:4)
9. Ora pro nobis beata Veronica
10. Domine exaudi
11. Domine deus virtutum converte nos (Psalm 79:20)
12. Oremus: Deus qui nobis signatus lumine vultus tui memoriale tuum ad
instantiam Veronice sudario impressam ymaginem relinquere voluisti per
passionem et crucem tuam tribue nobis quesumus ut nunc in terris per spec-
ulum in enigmate ipsam adorare et venerari valeamus ut facie ad faciem
venientem iudicem te securi videamus. Qui vivis et regnans cum Deo patre
in unitate spiritus sanctus deus per omnia secula seculorum. Amen.
Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 54, fol. 18
2. Fac mecum domine signum in bono (Psalm 85:17)
4. [O]remus: [Deu]s qui nobis signatus lumine vultus tui memoriale tuum ad
instanciam Veronice ymaginem tuam sudario impressam relinquere voluisti
per crucem et passionem tuam tribue ut ita nunc in terris per speculum
et in enigmate venerari adorare honorare ipsam valeamus ut te tunc facie

ad faciem venientem super nos iudicem securi videamus. Dominum nos-
trum vidi dominum facie ad faciem et salva facta es anima mea. Amen.
Amen. Amen.
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M.729, fol. 14v
1. Ynnocens li papes de Rome ist chestse orison en remision de tous pecheurs
quiconkes dira cheste orisonau sacrament il aura .lx. iors de pardon.
2. Deus miseratur
4. Fac mecum signum in bono (Psalm 85:17)
5. Orato [sic]: Deus qui nobis signatus vultus tui lumine memoriale tuum ad
instanciam Veronice ymaginem tuam sudario impressam relinquere voluisti
per passionem et crucem tuam et sanctum sudarium tuum tribue nobis ut
ita nunc in terris per speculum in enygmate [sic] venerari adorare honorare
ipsam valemus ut te tunc facie ad faciem venientem super nos iudicum securi
videamus. Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum. Amen.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE VERONICA AND THE VISIO DEI

Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ,

profound implications for theology, politics, and practices of devotion in

its intended viewer, in a reciprocal, transformational, and dizzying visual

The Veronica and Matthew Paris

tradition as opposed to a straightforward western European response to

home to a signiicant number of icons, some of which had resided there

proved durable and was sometimes invoked by more orthodox theologians,

5. Matthew Paris, Veronica, from the

which is so assertively a painting. Melanie Holcomb has argued that for a

devotion, using a kind of recombinant technology in order to retrieve the

earlier self-referential images of monastic scribes/artists must have con-

In Matthew’s formulation of the self-referential, devotional image, his

Visual Prayers: Uses of the Veronica

Matthew’s Veronicas belong to a small and iconographically distinct fam-

7. Holy Face, Psalter, England (Norwich), 1270–1280

by Matthew to Innocent III, with a few slight differences, as seen in the

“the Veronica.” The omission of any rubric mentioning “this image” or

10. The Wheel

containing tituli that indicate either a query made by Reason or a response

In short, it presents the viewer with a relection of God’s perception of his

11. The lover 0ffers his heart, mirror case, ivory,

of two horses. Michael Camille gives a perceptive reading of this relief, in

A further point of comparison between the secular mirror and the De

actual window to a painted “window” would probably have been a comfort-

14. Tree of Virtues, De Lisle Psalter, England (London?),

The compressed narrative image at the bottom of the Articles of the

15. Tree of Vices, De Lisle Psalter, England (London?),

Portrait as Proof: The Holy Face and the Visio Dei

In the winter of 1331–1332, John XXII preached a series of sermons

expressions of disapprobation from his usual allies. Although John declared

book. The viewer is left to decide whether she is a maid or lady-in-waiting

participated in the process of visual perception, actively emitting rays of its

Appendix: The Text of the “Ofice of Innocent III” and

et in enigmate venerari adorare honorare ipsam valeamus ut te tunc facie

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