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Copyright the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection

ON THE COVER: Veronica modestly displays the face that miraculously appeared on the linen cloth she used to wipe Jesus’ brow on the road to Calvary. The ghostly image of Jesus seems to have more substance and life than the pale woman, in Flemish artist Hans Memling’s St. Veronica, from the 1470s.

Veronica is never mentioned in the New Testament, but her tale became enormously popular in medieval and Renaissance Europe, which produced hundreds of copies and paintings of Veronica’s famous veil. In “The Two Faces of Jesus,” Robin M. Jensen surveys the earliest images of Jesus—both man-made and miraculous—and examines how the first Christians pictured the divine.