Translated from an Article published in I LUOGHI DELL’INFINITO,
2018 October/232, page 33
The magazine I LUOGHI dell'INFINITO is a monthly magazine linked to the daily newspaper Avvenire, an expression of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI)
The Veil of Secrets:
The enigma of Manoppello
The precious cloth preserved in the Abruzzo shrine
could it be the Veronica which disappeared from Rome?*
A concrete hypothesis between history and science
text by Heinrich Pfeiffer** Translated by Angelo Rytz
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| Fr. Heinrich Pfeiffer during the Omnis Terra Celebration at the Shrine of the Holy Face of Manoppello |
In a small town in Abruzzo lies one of the greatest treasures in the world. We are in Manoppello, not far from the ancient bishopric of Chieti, in a valley that leads south towards the slopes of the Maiella massif.
In the foothills behind the village, in 1621, the Capuchins built a convent. The treasure is here: an exceptionally fine cloth, probably Byssus. The white cloth, measuring 24 by 17 centimeters, is contained in a reliquary in the shape of a monstrance. From the fragile veil shines a face easily identifiable with the face of the Lord.
This piece of cloth contains many secrets. One of its mysteries is that the image vanishes almost completely when held against any light source. Another extraordinary fact is the color of the face, changing from gray to brown, while sometimes, depending on the observer's positIon, light red spots appear. There are also variations depending on the intensity and angle of the light on the fabric.
Other details include the many folds and a piece of chipped glass or crystal.
The first document treating of the veil is a manuscript by the Capuchin friar Donato di Bomba, written before 1646. This work of fifty-four pages is entitled Vera et breve relatione historica d'una miracolosa figura over’ imagine del volto di Christo Signore nostro passionato et tormentato; which is now found in the Convent of the Capuchin Fathers of Manoppello, Terra in Abruzzo Citra Province of the Kingdom of Naples. In this writing, it is said that in 1506, an unknown person brought the veil to Manoppello and gave it to a certain Giacomo Antonio Leonelli, disappearing immediately after the delivery without leaving a trace of himself. A descendant, Martia Leonelli, would have had the veil as a dowry for her wedding to the soldier Pancrazio Petrucci. But since her brother would not give her the object, her husband violently removed the veil from his brother-in-law's house. Petrucci was finally imprisoned in Chieti, and in order to free him, his wife in 1618 or – according to another version of the manuscript – in 1620, sold the veil for four scudi to Dr. Donato Antonio de Fabritis, who delivered it into the hands of the Capuchins.
The Capuchins could not have researched the object's provenance before 1621, the year of their arrival in Manoppello, which is why the only possible source of reference could be the narration of Martia Leonelli. It is unlikely that this woman remembered a date as precisely as 1506, from a distance of more than a century later.
Moreover, beyond and prior to the historical Relatione, no trace of the presence of the precious veil has ever been found in the town of Manoppello. De Fabritis donated the relic to the Capuchin Fathers in 1638. Father Donato di Bomba wrote the Relatione which was read in public in the town hall of Manoppello on 7 April 1646, followed by a notarial deed in which the text was defined as "historia seu legenda" (“history or legend”).
The thing that makes us curious is the fact that such an object had existed in Rome:
the famous relic of Veronica. Kept at one time in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, it disappeared during the Sack of Rome in 1527. The then director of the Vatican Museums, Professor Antonio Paolucci expressed himself in these terms, in an interview in 2011 coinciding with the presentation of the exhibition "The Man, the Face, the Mystery."
Are there any reasons that prevent us from identifying the veil of Manoppello with that of Veronica?
So far, no argument has been found to contradict this thesis. On the contrary, there are many reasons that lead us to accept it. The first consists in the fact that all the ancient representations and copies of Veronica executed until the beginning of the seventeenth century correspond to the features of the Holy Face of Manoppello, but not to those made later, since 1616, which were passed off as authentic copies of the Roman Veronica.
In this context, we note some strange measures taken by the popes. As early as 1616, Paul V forbade any reproduction of the relic, and when he was asked for a copy by the imperial court of Vienna, he had it executed by a canon of St. Peter's Basilica. This "copy," of no artistic value, is still preserved in the Weltliche Schatzkammer of the Vienna Hofburg and shows for the first time the Face of Christ with his eyes closed.
Even the few versions made during the three years of Gregory XV's reign show the same features as the one in Vienna. Pope Urban VIII had all the ancient and authentic copies of the Roman relic destroyed.
All these strange measures taken by the popes find an explanation in the theft of the original Veronica: a thesis that finds its confirmation in the fact that the Vatican archivist Giacomo Grimaldi, in 1618, recorded that the glass frame of the ancient reliquary of the Veil, dated 1350, was broken. The same archivist, in the very same year (but one could also think of a falsification of the original date: MDCXVI with the manipulated addition of two strokes to obtain MDCXVIII), drew the Face of Christ together with its reliquary, portraying the identical features of the Holy Face of Manoppello.
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| The Opusculum of Giacomo Grimaldi of 1618 |
These unusual acts of the popes could not have remained unknown to the Capuchins of the Abruzzo town. In fact, at that time, the religious tried to protect the relic itself, which probably had been saved and then hidden in Abruzzo. The Relatione historica was written to inform the Minister General of the Order in Rome, Father Innocentio di Caltagirone, about the events in Manoppello.
Did the fathers suspect that their veil was actually the Roman Veronica? We don't know. We have only clues that can be interpreted in this sense: the fathers waited until 1686 to dedicate a chapel to the relic of the Holy Face and until 1718 to ask Pope Clement XI to grant a plenary indulgence for pilgrims visiting the sanctuary.
There is much evidence to assert that the veil of Manoppello is identifiable with the Veronica. First of all, it is certain that there is no object in the entire world that so perfectly reflects, in every trait and detail, the Roman relic and that corresponds so faithfully to everything that is known about it. Only the image of Manoppello can give us a concrete vision of how it would have appeared to pilgrims and artists, especially in the period from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century.
The Veronica was a veil that was sometimes represented as transparent cloth and sometimes with the clear signs of many folds.
The recognizable Face on it had open eyes, the same wavy hair, and the beard divided into two parts of the Holy Face. It is enough to set up in parallel the innumerable images that we find in Western art to notice this.
On the other hand, the Holy Face of Manoppello cannot be a copy of a presumed lost original for two reasons. First, the image on the veil is reproduced with an unknown technique: anyone who would make copies would have had to adopt some known method to make them. Secondly, the Veil of Manoppello is the most richly detailed portrait among those renowned, whether in the East or in the West.
The rules of philology dictate that in a relationship of dependence between a model and its imitation, the object with the most considerable number of details is to be considered the original. At the same time, copies never report all the details in the progenitor image.
Other research on the Holy Face of Manoppello by a German nun, Sister Blandina Paschalis Schlömer, has proved to be of extreme interest. The nun compared the face of the veil and the features of the Holy Shroud of Turin using a remarkably simple but effective method: the superimposition of the two images on a 1:1 scale. As a result, with the exception of the traces of blood - or at least they seem to be, there is a perfect coincidence of all the details so that a single image is formed between the two faces without creating any disturbance or interference.
There seems to be only one explanation: the image of Manoppello could only have been formed when the two fabrics had been superimposed on each other.
If this first overlapping of the two fabrics took place in the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, then the story of the Holy Face would begin in the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, precisely as that of the Shroud of Turin.
If we admit, at least hypothetically, this possibility, we can try to write in broad terms the history of the veil of Manoppello. thus it seems probable to identify the relic with another Face of Christ on cloth of which we have historical information: the image Camulia, in Cappadocia. As the Byzantine historian George Cedrenus writes, in 574, the acheropita, the image of Christ not made by human hands, is said to have arrived in Constantinople from Camulia. This image in the capital made up for the disappearance of the labarum, the flag of the Roman troops created by Constantine, which had been lost since the time of the empire of Julian the Apostate. In its place, the holy image was carried before the troops during battles.
The victories were celebrated by poets who emphasized the role played by the acheropita, taking care to report some descriptions of it.
The poet Theophylact Simokatta, for example, wrote on the occasion of the battle near the Arzamon River in 586 that the image had been executed by divine hand, so it was neither woven nor painted. If one observes the veil of Manoppello attentively, together with its image, one can become perfectly aware that this Face is neither painted on the cloth nor is it a woven image. There is no trace of pigment on the cloth while the image is perfectly visible from both sides, as if were one with the threads of the cloth. Not even weaving can explain it because each thread of weft is not shown to be of a single color in its length but divided into different shades that change from one to the other almost indistinctly. The image of Camulia remained in Constantinople until about 705 when the second period of Justinian II's rule began. In the interregnum, the Acheropite image must have been lost.
It was only in 753, on the occasion of the Lombard siege of Aistulf, that there was news of an "Acheropsita"(sic): an icon of Christ in the chapel of the Sancta Santorum of the Lateran Palace in Rome. The upper part of this icon was covered by a veil with the Face of Christ depicted.
Was the first veil placed over the icon perhaps the same image of Camulia, later replaced by a second veil with a painted face when the Lateran "Acheropsita" was secretly transported to St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, where it assumed the new name of Veronica? This hypothesis could bridge the gap between the loss of the image of Camulia in Constantinople in about 705 and the appearance of Veronica in St. Peter's towards the end of the twelfth century.
How is it possible to identify four different objects (the images of Camulia, the Lateran, St. Peter's, and Manoppello) as the same object? The fundamental reason lies only in the fact that we are always treating of an image on cloth, but above all in the mysterious character of the Holy Face itself.
It's difficult to accept that there might exist a number of images with the same inexplicable properties.
Finally, let us recall two events of particular importance. Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Manoppello on September 1, 2006, to whom we owe the elevation of the modest shrine to the status of a minor basilica.
And the re-enactment, during the Jubilee of Mercy, of the ancient procession of the Holy Face from St. Peter's to the nearby basilica of Santo Spirito in Sassia, established by Pope Innocent III in 1208. For the occasion, a copy of the Holy Face was brought by the Capuchins from Manoppello to Rome and was exhibited on January 16 and 17, 2016 in the Basilica of Santo Spirito.
During the solemn Eucharistic celebration, the Prefect of the Papal Household, Georg Gänswein, said: "This is a copy of that ancient original that Pope Innocent III showed to pilgrims and that for four hundred years has been kept in Abruzzo on the Adriatic, in a peripheral area of Italy, from where today for the first time it has been brought back to the place where its public worship began."
*Jesuit, art historian, (1939-2021)
**The question in the subtitle of the article was inserted by the editorial staff of the magazine I Luoghi dell'Infinito
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