An important piece of the Museo dei Cappuccini in Milan is the Veil of Veronica consistently attributed to Guercino, an Emilian painter active in the seventeenth century.

The work depicts the face of the Passion of Christ imprinted on a cloth, an iconography that begins to develop in the context of Nordic painting, which represents it as an ecstatic image so as to make it a devotional effigy par excellence. In Italy this motif spreads from the end of the fifteenth century, thanks to the presence of some illustrious Flemish examples, who experimented with some success this iconographic formula.

The canvas is fully inserted within the iconographic tradition linked to the holy relic of the Veil of Veronica, a cloth on which the face of Christ is imprinted on the way to Calvary. The spotlights are focused on the suffering face of Christ, carefully constructing his somatic features, wavy hair and gnarled crown of thorns.

The reference to Guercino is justifiable in formal terms, given the type of face, the enameled drafting, full of warm and chiaroscuro lights and the interpretation of the subject in ecstatic and softened terms. Finally, consistent with the standards reached by the painter is the high quality of the work, where the virtuosity of the execution and the capacity for stylistic and mental investigation offer a highly suggestive result.