The sudarium of Saint Veronica has been painted since the Middle Ages. According to legend, Veronica met Jesus on the road to Calvary and wiped his bloody face with her veil, and his features stayed printed on the cloth. The veil was said to heal the sick and was kept as one of the holiest relics of Christendom. Sudario comes from the Latin for sweat, and it is also the word Spanish speakers use for the burial shroud of Christ. Veronica never appears in the Gospels. Medieval writers explained her name as vera icon, the true image, and she may well have been named after the image rather than the other way around.

The veil belongs to a small family of sacred images the Greeks called acheiropoieta, "not made by hands": the Veil, the Mandylion of Edessa, the Shroud of Turin, and in the Americas the tilma of Guadalupe. For centuries they were revered precisely because no painter had made them. Today we are flooded with images no hand has made, faces generated by machines in seconds. So I painted this one slowly, by hand, the way Zurbarán painted his Santa Faz, the cloth pinned at its corners like a trompe l'oeil. Behind it, where his backgrounds stood dark and empty, code falls like rain, and the veil hangs over it like a screen, the first screen ever to hold a face.

The face of Christ is perhaps the best-known face of a man in all of human history, a relic that has crossed millennia, religions, and cultures. Christ is God incarnate in human flesh, God within us. Here he looks straight out at us, eyes open, painted in the color of dried blood. When we meet this face in an age of AI and algorithms, when any face can be generated and any image faked, the question carried in Veronica's name returns: what is a true image? It reminds us of what makes us human.