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The Spanish baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán(1598-1664) adopted “monastic” repetition as his major modus operandi to contemplate the biblical legend of Veronica. The aim in this <Santa Faz> was not only to recreate his testimony to the truth of this “miracle”, acheiropoietic by definition, but mainly to contemplate the difference between this truth and its coming into being outside the mimetic realm. In 1658, six years before his death, emerging from his canvas are mere faint traces of a head almost completely devoid of figurativeness. A number of scholars interpreted this non-representational holy face, paradoxically enshrined in a highly ascetic yet realistic mimetic setting as an image, as a divine trompe-l’œil (Caturla), an image to be completed by the spectator’s imagination (Belting and Stoichita), a mimetic presence and paragone (Ostrow) or an image opening up the dialectics of auratic contact (Didi-Huberman). Zurbarán’s staging of the enigmatic disappearance does confirm these accounts, but the specificity of his repetition leading up to this disappearance calls them into question. Our question, which takes Belting’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari as a turning point, is to ask if the disappearing of representation can be understood as aiming for a concept of future beyond the tautological theories of destruction of icon, “zero degree” or differentiation.

Acheiropoietos, Difference, Francisco de Zurbarán, Gilles Deleuze, Hans Belting, Making disappear, Mimesis, Repetition, Visagéité