The image is a translucent veil of sea silk (byssus / bisso marino) — a rare fabric woven from the filaments of the pinna nobilis mollusc, used in antiquity but virtually unobtainable today. It measures approximately 17 × 24 cm. On its surface is visible the face of a bearded man with open eyes and a slightly parted mouth, in faint sepia tones. The image is visible identically from both sides of the veil — a property of which no painted or printed image is capable.
The cloth has been at Manoppello in the Abruzzo region since around 1638. A line of scholars — most prominently the German Jesuit Heinrich Pfeiffer (1999) and the German Trappist nun Sister Blandina Paschalis Schlömer — have proposed that this veil is in fact the Veil of Veronica that disappeared from St. Peter's around 1608, and that it corresponds exactly, when overlaid on the face of the Shroud of Turin, to the Shroud's face dimensions. The identification is contested but the cloth's material composition (impossible to paint on conventionally) remains unexplained. Pope Benedict XVI made a private pilgrimage to Manoppello in September 2006.