O véu de Santa Verônica, a Santa Face

The relic itself was in Rome, a cloth kept inside one of the great piers of St Peter's and shown to pilgrims from a balcony a few times a year. Almost nobody in Seville would ever see it. In the 1630s Zurbaran painted the substitute several times over, a square of linen hung against a dark ground, hard light from one side picking out the folds, and the face of Christ in the crown of thorns coming through in pale grey. He kept it faint deliberately. Devotional writers of the period told readers to meet an image halfway and complete it in the mind, and a sharper face would have done that work for them. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm bought this version in 1957.