According toChristian tradition, theImage of Edessa was a holyrelic consisting of a square or rectangle of cloth upon which a miraculous image of the face ofJesus Christ had been imprinted—the firsticon (lit. 'image'). The image is also known as theMandylion (Greek:μανδύλιον, 'cloth' or 'towel'),[1] inEastern Orthodoxy, it is also known as anAcheiropoieton (Greek:Εἰκόν' ἀχειροποίητη,lit. 'icon not made by hand').
In the tradition recorded in the early 4th century byEusebius of Caesarea,[2] KingAbgar of Edessa wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Abgar received a reply letter from Jesus, declining the invitation, but promising a future visit by one of his disciples. One of theseventy disciples,Thaddeus of Edessa, is said to have come toEdessa, bearing the words of Jesus, by the virtues of which the king was miraculously healed. Eusebius said that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in theSyriacchancery documents of the king of Edessa, but who makes no mention of an image.[3] The report of an image, which accrued to the legendarium of Abgar, first appears in the Syriac work theDoctrine of Addai: according to it, the messenger, here called Ananias, was also a painter, and he painted the portrait, which was brought back to Edessa and conserved in the royal palace.[3]
The first record of the existence of a physical image in the ancient city ofEdessa (nowUrfa) was byEvagrius Scholasticus, writing about 593, who reports a portrait of Christ of divine origin (θεότευκτος), which effected the miraculous aid in thedefence of Edessa against the Persians in 544.[4] The image was moved toConstantinople in the 10th century. The cloth disappeared when Constantinople wassacked in 1204 during theFourth Crusade, and is believed by some to have reappeared as a relic in KingLouis IX of France'sSainte-Chapelle inParis. This relic disappeared in theFrench Revolution.[5]
Theprovenance of the Edessa letter between the 1st century and its location in his own time are not reported by Eusebius. The materials, according to the scholarRobert Eisenman, "are very widespread in the Syriac sources with so many multiple developments and divergences that it is hard to believe they could all be based on Eusebius' poor efforts".[6]
The Eastern Orthodox Church observes a feast for this icon on August 16, which commemorates itstranslation from Edessa to Constantinople.
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The story of the Mandylion is likely the product of centuries of development. The first version is found inEusebius'History of the Church (1.13.5–1.13.22). Eusebius claimed that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. This records a letter written by KingAbgar of Edessa to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Jesus replies by letter, saying that when he had completed his earthly mission and ascended to heaven, he would send a disciple (Thaddeus of Edessa) to heal Abgar (and does so). At this stage, there is no mention of an image of Jesus.[7]
In AD 384,Egeria, a pilgrim from either Gaul or Spain, was given a personal tour by the Bishop of Edessa, who provided her with many marvellous accounts of miracles that had saved Edessa from the Persians and put into her hands transcripts of the correspondence of Abgarus and Jesus, with embellishments. Part of her accounts of her travels, in letters to her sisterhood, survive. "She naïvely supposed that this version was more complete than the shorter letter which she had read in a translation at home, presumably one brought back to the Far West by an earlier pilgrim".[8] Her escorted tour, accompanied by a translator, was thorough; the bishop is quoted: "Now let us go to the gate where the messenger Ananias came in with the letter of which I have been telling you."[8] There was however, no mention of any image reported by Egeria, who spent three days inspecting every corner of Edessa and the environs.
The next stage of development appears in theDoctrine of Addai [Thaddeus], c. 400, which introduces a court painter among a delegation sent by Abgar to Jesus, who paints a portrait of Jesus to take back to his master:
When Hannan, the keeper of the archives, saw that Jesus spoke thus to him, by virtue of being the king's painter, he took and painted a likeness of Jesus with choice paints, and brought with him to Abgar the king, his master. And when Abgar the king saw the likeness, he received it with great joy, and placed it with great honor in one of his palatial houses.
— Doctrine of Addai, 13
The later legend of the image recounts that because the successors of Abgar reverted to paganism, the bishop placed the miraculous image inside a wall, and setting a burning lamp before the image, he sealed them up behind a tile; that the image was later found again, after a vision, on the very night of the Persian invasion, and that not only had itmiraculously reproduced itself on the tile, but the same lamp was still burning before it; further, that the bishop of Edessa used a fire into which oil flowing from the image was poured to destroy the Persians.
The image itself is said to have resurfaced in 525, during a flood of the Daisan, a tributary stream of theEuphrates that passed by Edessa. This flood is mentioned in the writings of the court historianProcopius of Caesarea. In the course of the reconstruction work, a cloth bearing the facial features of a man was discovered hidden in the wall above one of the gates of Edessa.
Writing soon after the Persian siege of 544,Procopius says that the text of Jesus' letter, by then including a promise that "no enemy would ever enter the city", was inscribed over the city gate, but does not mention an image. Procopius is sceptical about the authenticity of the promise, but says that the wish to disprove it was part of the Persian kingKhosrau I's motivation for the attack, as "it kept irritating his mind".[9] The SyriacChronicle of Edessa written in 540-550 also claim divine interventions in the siege, but does not mention the Image.[10]
Some fifty years later,Evagrius Scholasticus in hisEcclesiastical History (593) is the first to mention a role for the image in the relief of the siege,[11] attributing it to a "God-made image", a miraculous imprint of the face of Jesus upon a cloth. Thus we can trace the development of the legend from a letter, but no image in Eusebius, to an image painted by a court painter in Addai, which becomes a miracle caused by a miraculously-created image supernaturally made when Jesus pressed a cloth to his wet face in Evagrius. It was this last and latest stage of the legend that became accepted in Eastern Orthodoxy, the image of Edessa that was "created by God, and not produced by the hands of man". This idea of an icon that wasAcheiropoietos (Greek:Αχειροποίητη,lit. 'not made by hand') is a separate enrichment of the original legend: similar legends of supernatural origins have accrued to other Orthodox icons.
TheAncha icon is reputed to be theKeramidion, anotheracheiropoietos recorded from an early period, miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ by contact with the Mandylion. To art historians it is aGeorgian icon of the 6th-7th century.
According to theGolden Legend, which is a collection ofhagiographies compiled byJacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth century, the king Abgarus sent an epistle to Jesus, who answered him writing that he would send him one of his disciples (Thaddeus of Edessa) to heal him. The same work adds:
And when Abgarus saw that he might not see God presently, after that it is said in an ancient history, as John Damascene witnesseth in his fourth book, he sent a painter unto Jesu Christ for to figure the image of our Lord, to the end that at least that he might see him by his image, whom he might not see in his visage. And when the painter came, because of the great splendour and light that shone in the visage of our Lord Jesu Christ, he could not behold it, ne could not counterfeit it by no figure. And when our Lord saw this thing he took from the painter a linen cloth and set it upon his visage, and emprinted the very phisiognomy of his visage therein, and sent it unto the king Abgarus which so much desired it. And in the same history is contained how this image was figured. It was well-eyed, well-browed, a long visage or cheer, and inclined, which is a sign of maturity or ripe sadness.[12][13]
TheHoly Mandylion disappeared again after theSassanians conqueredEdessa in 609.[citation needed] A local legend, related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visitedUrfa (Edessa) in 1997, relates that the towel or burial cloth (منديلmendil) ofJesus was thrown into a well in what is today the city's Great Mosque.[8] The Christian tradition exemplified inGeorgios Kedrenos'Historiarum compendium[14] is at variance with this,John Scylitzes[15] recounting how in 944, when the city was besieged byJohn Kourkouas, it was exchanged for a group of Muslim prisoners. At that time the Image of Edessa was taken toConstantinople where it was received amidst great celebration by emperorRomanos I Lekapenos, who deposited it in theTheotokos of the Pharos chapel in theGreat Palace of Constantinople. Not inconsequentially, the earliest known Byzantine icon of the Mandylion or Holy Face, preserved atSaint Catherine's Monastery inEgypt, is dated c. 945.[16]
The Mandylion remained under Imperial protection until the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204 and carried off many of its treasures to Western Europe, though the "Image of Edessa" is not mentioned in this context in any contemporary document. Similarly, it has been claimed that theShroud of Turin disappeared from Constantinople in 1204, when Crusaders looted the city. The leaders of the Crusader army in this instance were French and Italian (from Venice), and it is believed that somehow because of this, the Shroud made its way to France.[17] A small part of a relic, believed to be the same as this, was one of the large group sold byBaldwin II of Constantinople toLouis IX of France in 1241 and housed in theSainte-Chapelle in Paris (not to be confused with the Sainte Chapelle atChambéry, home for a time of the Shroud of Turin) until it disappeared during theFrench Revolution.[5]
The Portuguese JesuitJerónimo Lobo, who visited Rome in 1637, mentions the sacred portrait sent to King Abgar as being in this city: "I saw the famous relics that are preserved in that city as in a sanctuary, a large part of the holy cross, pieces of the crown and several thorns, the sponge, the lance, Saint Thomas's finger, one of the thirty coins for which the Saviour was sold, the sacred portrait, the one that Christ Our Lord sent to King Abagaro, the sacred staircase on which Christ went up and down from the Praetorium, the head of the holy Baptist, the Column, the Altar on which Saint Peter said mass, and countless other relics."[18]
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Three images survive today which are associated with theMandylion.
AuthorIan Wilson has argued that the object venerated as the Mandylion from the 6th to the 13th centuries was in fact the Shroud of Turin, folded in four, and enclosed in an oblong frame so that only the face was visible.[19] Wilson cites documents in theVatican Library and theUniversity of Leiden, Netherlands, which seem to suggest the presence of another image at Edessa. A 10th-century codex,Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69,[20] found by Gino Zaninotto in theVatican Library, contains an 8th-century account saying that an imprint of Christ's whole body was left on a canvas kept in a church in Edessa: it quotes a man called Smera in Constantinople: "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body" (Latin:[non tantum] faciei figuram sed totius corporis figuram cernere poteris).[21]
This image is kept in theChurch of St Bartholomew of The Armenians inGenoa, Italy. In the 14th century it was donated to thedoge of Genoa Leonardo Montaldo by the Byzantine EmperorJohn V Palaeologus.
It has been the subject of a detailed 1969 study by Colette Dufour Bozzo, who dated the outer frame to the late 14th century,[22] giving aterminus ante quem for the inner frame and the image itself. Bozzo found that the image was imprinted on a cloth that had been pasted onto a wooden board.[23][24]
The similarity of the image with theVeil of Veronica suggests a link between the two traditions.
This image was kept in Rome's church ofSan Silvestro in Capite, attached to a convent ofPoor Clares, up to 1870, and is now kept in the Matilda chapel in theVatican Palace. It is housed in a Baroque frame added by Sister Dionora Chiarucci, head of the convent, in 1623.[25] The earliest evidence of its existence is 1517, when the nuns were forbidden to exhibit it to avoid competition with the Veronica. Like the Genoa image, it is painted on board and therefore is likely to be a copy. It was exhibited at Germany's Expo 2000 in the pavilion of the Holy See.
Historian Rebecca Rist says that devotion toSaint Veronica was encouraged byPope Innocent III in part to compete with Constantinople's Mandylion and increase the prestige of Rome and its pope by claiming a similar acheiropoieta, theVeil of Veronica.[26][27]
In later Western European tradition the main likeness of the face of Jesus not made by human hand (i.e., anacheiropoieton), became the Veil of Veronica, supposedly the cloth offered by Saint Veronica to Jesus so he could wipe his face on the way to his crucifixion. That the name "Veronica" may derive from "true image" ('vera icon'), (alternatively[clarification needed]pherenike ("bearer of blessing" in Greek), and the late appearance of this legend, has increased the scepticism of scholars.[28] A cloth believed to exist today in the Vatican is supposed to have been brought back to Italy at the time of theCrusades.[29] The Veil of Veronica (Latin:Sudarium, 'sweat-cloth'), often called simply "The Veronica" and known in Italian as the Volto Santo or Holy Face (but not to be confused with the carved crucifix theVolto Santo of Lucca), is a Christian relic of a piece of cloth which, according to tradition, bears the image of Jesus' face. Various existing images have been claimed to be the "original" relic, or early copies of it.[30]
Accounts of the Veil of Veronica and the Image of Edessa are sometimes confused by scholars.[31]
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