In 1445, a Flemish painter painted a hovering angel almost entirely in black. With dark robes and dark wings, it presses its hands to its face, crying. The contrast with the pale background sky is deliberate: the figure is engulfed in darkness, but its agony is clearly visible. Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion Triptych, detail. There are four mourning angels in total in the scene, all painted in these dark tones. They're positioned at the level of Christ's body, suspended above the earth. There's an interesting detail about this triptych: originally, it wasn't a triptych at all. Van der Weyden painted it on a single panel, painting the frames directly onto the surface using the trompe-l'oeil (optical illusion) technique. Shortly after it was finished, the panel was sawed into three pieces. On the right wing, Saint Veronica holds the veil bearing the imprint of Christ's face. Veronica isn't in the Bible. Her name doesn't appear in any canonical texts. Her first written record is in the Acts of Pilate, an apocryphal text from the 4th century, and even there, she has nothing to do with the veil. She's simply mentioned as a bleeding woman who was healed by touching Christ's cloak. The veil story emerged much later, in the 13th century,in Roger d'Argenteuil's French Bible. The motif of Christ wiping his face on the way to the crucifixion and leaving a miraculous imprint on the veil was only added then. The origin of her name is also debated: according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, it was formed by blending the Latin word vera (true) and the Greek word eikon (image) in popular speech. So, the veil was first called the 'vera icon' (true image), and this description later turned into a woman's name. Pope John Paul II said this clearly during the Stations of the Cross in 2000: 'Perhaps this name describes what the woman did, rather than who she was.' In this panel, Van der Weyden painted Veronica as a young, elegant woman with a flawless complexion. While traditional iconography usually shows Veronica with an old, wrinkled face, Van der Weyden did the exact opposite. On top of that, he painted Mary Magdalene as an older woman, even though she's usually depicted as young. Art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote this about Van der Weyden's work: '...A brilliant pearl born of the most intense emotion. It epitomizes what the Italians admired most in Early Flemish painting: pictorial brilliance and sentiment...' Van der Weyden is considered the first artist in European painting to depict scenes where figures are visibly crying. Before him, grief and agony were conveyed through facial expressions, body posture, or hand gestures. Van der Weyden took this a step further: genuine, glistening, wet teardrops are actually flowing from the figures' eyes. Also, Van der Weyden achieved another first in European painting with this piece: he placed the donors in the exact same space, at the same scale, and in front of the same landscape as the holy figures. The only distinction between them is a subtle crack in the ground.There are no patron saints between them, no architectural partitions - just a fine crack in the earth.
