Veronica

Unlike Joseph of Arimathea or Caiaphas, Veronica has no place in the canonical New Testament at all. No Gospel records a woman wiping the face of Jesus on the road to Calvary, and no early Christian writer knows the episode. She is, in the strict sense, a legendary figure, a person created by devotion rather than reported by a source.

Her story is now most familiar from the Stations of the Cross, where the sixth station shows her offering her veil to the suffering Christ and receiving his image in return. This devotion is itself a development of the later Middle Ages; the fourteen stations took their settled form only in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and Veronica's station is part of that growth, not an ancient memory.

The atlas classes her historicity as debated in the precise sense that the tradition itself does not rest on attested testimony: there is a rich cult and a beloved image, but the woman behind them cannot be traced to any early witness. What can be traced is the name, and the name turns out to explain a great deal about how the figure came to be.

The most widely accepted explanation of the name is linguistic. The venerated cloth kept at Rome, bearing what was believed to be the imprinted face of Christ, was called the vera icon, Latin vera, "true," and Greek eikon, "image", the true image. In popular speech vera icon is thought to have contracted into Veronica, so that the name of the relic was gradually mistaken for the name of a person, and a woman was invented to account for it.

An older strand supplied a candidate to bear the name. The apocryphal Acts of Pilate tells of a woman called Bernice (Greek Berenike), whom Western tradition identified with the unnamed woman healed of a haemorrhage in the Gospels. In the legend she possesses an image of Christ, in some versions painted, in others miraculously formed, and carries it to Rome, where it heals the emperor Tiberius. Medieval writers merged this Bernice with the vera icon and produced the composite Saint Veronica.

The two accounts agree on the essential point the atlas records: the personal name is secondary. Whether by contraction of vera icon or by identification with Bernice, Veronica the woman grew out of Veronica the picture, and the roadside episode is a late crystallization of a much older cult of the Holy Face.

The relic to which the legend is attached, the Veil of Veronica, has been venerated at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican since at least the early eighth century, kept in the pier of Saint Veronica and shown only rarely. In the later Middle Ages it was among the most celebrated relics of Christendom, a chief object of the Roman Jubilee pilgrimages, and copies of the Holy Face, the vernicle, were carried by pilgrims across Europe.

Its modern state is genuinely obscure. The cloth at Saint Peter's is displayed so seldom, and is reportedly so faded, that its condition cannot be publicly assessed, and a rival image at Manoppello in central Italy has been claimed by some as the true original. The atlas records the object in its Artifact dimension as debated: an image of unestablished origin and history, venerated as miraculous but not authenticated.

The figure and the relic are thus mutually dependent. The woman exists to explain the cloth, and the cloth carries the woman's name; neither can be verified independently of the devotion that produced both. The atlas relates Veronica to the Veil of Veronica on exactly that footing, a legendary saint named for a "true image," honestly labelled as such.