Christ has frequently been thematised in Slovene literature from the time of the transition from manuscript to print. However, Jesus is the Word Incarnate and has an image, and the only true image of Christ was believed to be the vera icon, the imprint of the face of Christ on a cloth, which matches with Him completely, because it is not the result of mediation by the painter’s hand, but of direct contact of a cloth with Christ’s face. Despite the fact that mechanical reproduction only ensures the identity of the copy and the model, the reproduction of the vera icon remains in the domain of painting. And despite the fact that reproductions are imitations of the physical appearance of Jesus, they differ from each other in physiognomic detail, because the emphasis was placed on creativity, and not on repetition. For vera icon is a model of a peculiar kind – it cannot be imitated precisely, but rather it encourages the search for God, the signified whose special feature is to slip fixation into infinity.
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