Artwork story
About Emperor Vespasian Cured by Veronica's Veil
The artist and artwork
An unidentified Brussels workshop wove Emperor Vespasian Cured by Veronica's Veil around 1510. This nearly square tapestry is more than eleven feet high and wide, built from wool, silk, and silk wrapped in gilt metal strip. No artist's name survives: a design or cartoon had to be translated by highly skilled weavers into interlocking colored threads. It was both a monumental picture and an expensive furnishing.
The world around it
Brussels became a leading European tapestry center as the Burgundian court made the city important to artistic and commercial life. Its Guild of Saint Luke had held a monopoly over figurative tapestry cartoons since 1476, and workshops perfected painterly effects in woven form. They favored crowded narrative and decorative complexity around 1510. Soon afterward, Pope Leo X's commission of Raphael's Acts of the Apostles cartoons brought Roman High Renaissance design into Brussels. This work stands near that threshold. The Met traces its story to a twelfth-century French epic later popularized in fourteenth-century mystery plays.
A detail to notice
Veronica stands near the center and presents the cloth that, according to legend, received Christ's image when she wiped his face on the road to Calvary. The crowned Vespasian kneels before the Holy Face to be cured. The miracle becomes a courtly spectacle: witnesses crowd balconies and the foreground; long staffs divide the gathering; a curtained bedchamber opens at right; buildings appear at left. A small white dog stands between the ruler and two patterned chests. The border mixes flowers, fruit, birds, and other animals. Gilt-metal-wrapped silk heightened the surface but nearly caused its destruction. The Met calls its survival remarkable because during the French Revolution many tapestries containing precious metal thread were burned or melted down. Magnificent material also made textiles vulnerable to salvage.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is tapestry made in Wool, silk, and gilt-metal-strip-wrapped silk in slit, dovetailed, and double interlocking tapestry weave. and held in the Robert Lehman Collection department.
Recorded dimensions include 135 1/2" x 135" (344.2 cm x 342.9 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Men, Women, Dogs, Christ, and Beds. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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