Tristan Weddigen: Weaving Veronica: A Christian Founding Myth of the Textile Medium

The paper explores one of the paradigms and founding myths of Western image production, the imprint of the Holy Face, in respect to its materiality as a textile. The textile picture has a peculiar identity because it merges the image and its support. The paper will focus on an early modern series of woven depictions of Veronica presenting the sudarium, an iconography reflecting on the image and its materiality. At the same time the subject also questions the notion of materiality because textiles are not a material, a technique, a medium or a metaphor only, but all of them.

Tristan Weddigen is Professor for the History of Early Modern Art at the University of Zurich. He has received his Ph. D. from the Technical University Berlin, published as "Raffaels Papageienzimmer" in 2006. He has taught at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and the Universities of Bern and Lausanne. In 2010 he has been Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He works on early modern art and art theory, the history of art collections (especially the Dresden Picture Gallery in the 18th and 19th c.), and the history and methodology of art history. He is currently Principal Investigator of the research project "An Iconology of the Textile Medium in Art and Architecture", financed by the European Research Council and the Swiss National Science Foundation. For more information please see http://www.khist.uzh.ch/neuzeit.html