Jan. 15 – “The face of Jesus: from that gaze, the human person is born” is an exhibition held at the Manhattan Center this weekend (Friday-Sunday) as part of “New Yorker Encounter 2014”, a fair organized by young American catholics with concerts, debates, presentations and exhibitions. The aforementioned exhibition will cover the myth surrounding Christ’s facial features. It finds its reference point in Volto Santo di Manoppello, protected for the past 500 years in the town by the same name by the Cappuccini monastery. The extremely thin veil has imprinted on its cloth a suffering face, which should represent Veronica’s face – a legendary figure once worshipped in Rome whose features were believed to be divine. Raffaella Zardoni, curator for the exhibition first announced at the Rimini Meeting, explains how the show came to life: “at the iconographic level, we wanted to assess how many replicas of the Veil were made in Medieval Europe. We created a map on Google Earth and the website Veronica Route, hosting the 1500 replicas. Because of the unique beauty of each piece, we decided to organize an exhibition, now being hosted in New York.” Zardoni also underlines that “in this moment, we wanted to highlight the love for Christ behind this early pan-European historical movement.”
