Nicole Blackwood: “Why Michelangelo Laughed at the ‘Saint Veronica Altarpiece’ in Old Saint Peter’s”

“Why Michelangelo Laughed at the ‘Saint Veronica Altarpiece’ in Old Saint Peter’s”

Nicole Blackwood

At the time of the great Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo, Dürer, and Bramante, a little-known woodcut engraver, Ugo da Carpi, made a painting that was to accompany one of the most important relics in Saint Peter’s, the vera icon, or miraculous imprint of Christ’s face.  For more than eighty years, this obscure painting was placed on an altar directly below the chamber that housed the divine relic.  This paper will explore the theological issues at stake in the vera icon in Rome and how Ugo’s painting reproduced the relic in such a peculiar way that it brought Michelangelo to a state of laughter during mass.

Nicole Blackwood is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto where she is currently completing a book on the Dutch artist Cornelis Ketel (1548-1616) and preparing an exhibition on early arctic explorations in the sixteenth century – from Nunavut to Novaya Zemlya.  She received her MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and her BA from the University of Toronto.  She has held fellowships at the Dutch Institute in Florence, Harvard University, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Yale Centre for British Art, and has published on early modern self-portraiture and innovative painting techniques in the Italian Renaissance.