Eating the face of Christ: Philip the Good and his physical relationship with Veronicas

Philip the Good (1396-1467) updated his grandfather’s prayer book with many images, including no fewer than six depicting the Face of Christ. Larger images served as folios, and smaller images were sewn to a page. He handled these Veronicas intensely and even kissed them. Facial oils and dirt deposited in cumulative layers on the images testify to the duke’s intense facial contact with the Veronicas. Furthermore, the Veronicas received another kind of treatment: the paint of two of the Veronicas has been scraped off, revealing the parchment underneath. Carefully avoiding the eyes, the knife-wielder has targeted the paint from the forehead and nose. But why? This article proposes that the paint may have been released so that the duke could ingest the very substance of his favourite images, possibly during his attenuated demise while suffering from pneumonia. In this way, the duke would have been restoring a medicinal function to the image-icon, which had, after all, been brought to Rome as a cure. Other owners of small Veronicas likewise scraped them, possibly as medicine. If this hypothesis is correct, then it also explains why such images were often painted in thick body colour that can easily be scraped away.