The Holy Face, ca. 1953

The Holy Face shows the face of Christ pictured on Veronica’s cloth. Tradition has it that during the ‘way of the cross’, a woman wiped the sweat and blood from Christ’s face. The imprint left on the cloth was considered the only true portrayal of Christ. The woman was only later given the name Veronica, which is a corruption of the Latin-Greek ‘vera eikon’, meaning ‘the true depiction’. The French painter Georges Rouault drew inspiration from both biblical stories and contemporary events to express human suffering and the injustice of the world. Christ, as the personification of this human suffering, appears repeatedly in his oeuvre. Rouault is known to have painted no less than eight different versions of The Holy Face.