The other Veronica

Say the name Veronica in front of a picture and most readers supply the same object: a cloth bearing an imprinted face, held open. That is Veronica of Jerusalem, and this catalogue holds an entry for her under the title The Shroud of Saint Veronica. The saint named here is a different woman — Veronica of Binasco, from the Milanese country, whose tradition is narrower and who never acquired a comparable sign. She has no cloth. The title is doing the whole of the identifying work, and the place name attached to it is what keeps the two apart.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1816 and gives the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium as its location. The dimensions are 92 x 82 cm, an upright close to square. It is filed under female portraiture, cultural heritage and religious cultural heritage, with Neoclassicism as the style and Belgian as the nationality; the measured colour family is red.

What happens to a saint with no object

2 titles in this catalogue contain the name, one for each woman. The imbalance between them is a good demonstration of how the attribute system distributes attention: a saint with a portable, unmistakable sign is painted repeatedly across centuries, and a saint without one depends on a title, a local cult, and a record that spells out which is meant.