A Santa Face

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the 1580s, a Spanish city thick with relics and religious feeling during the Counter-Reformation. The subject is an old legend. A woman, later called Veronica, wiped Christ's face as he carried the cross, and his features were left imprinted on her cloth, an image said to be made by no human hand. El Greco plays with that idea. He paints a plain veil held open, its edges rippling, and lets the face of Christ appear on the fabric itself, with nothing behind it. He returned to this motif several times in these years, when the Church was insisting hard that such holy images deserved veneration.