Veronica's Veil

In 1580 Philip II commissioned El Greco to paint a large altarpiece for the monastery at El Escorial. He worked on it for two years, and the king then declined to put it over the altar. In the same years the Toledo workshop was turning out small devotional pictures like this one, in a city where Counter-Reformation piety kept the demand steady. The subject is the cloth Veronica is said to have handed Christ on the road to Calvary, which came back to her with his face on it. The whole picture is that cloth, pinned and stretched, the folds and tie points worked out with care, the face resting on the surface against a dark ground. An image that no painter made was a familiar idea to him from Crete, where he grew up among icons, and he signed this one in the lower right in Greek letters.