The Holy Mandylion: The Face Not Made by Hands

On 16 August 944, the city of Constantinople turned out for a procession. The Byzantine army had besieged Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa in Turkey), then under Muslim rule, and had lifted the siege in exchange for the city's most sacred treasure: a cloth said to bear the face of Christ, imprinted not by any artist but by Christ himself. The emperor received it and placed it in the palace chapel of the Pharos among the empire's holiest relics. The Byzantines called it the Mandylion, "the little cloth". Its story had begun centuries earlier, with a king who wrote to Jesus.

The legend grows

• c. 325. The church historian Eusebius says that he found in the archives of Edessa letters between King Abgar V, who was ill, and Jesus, who promised to send a disciple to heal him. No image is mentioned.
• c. 400. The Syriac Doctrine of Addai adds that Abgar's envoy painted a portrait of Jesus and brought it home.
• c. 593. Evagrius Scholasticus writes that during the Persian siege of Edessa in 544, an image "made by God" (theoteuktos) saved the city. This is the first record of the image as miraculous.
• Later legend. Jesus pressed a cloth to his wet face, leaving his likeness, and sent it to Abgar. The image was said to have been hidden in the city wall, rediscovered, and even to have printed copies of itself on tiles.

After 1204

When crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, the Pharos chapel's relics were scattered; some reached Paris, where the Crown of Thorns (V06) went. The Mandylion's fate is undocumented. Two images each claim to be it:

• The Holy Face of Genoa, kept in the church of San Bartolomeo degli Armeni, said to have come to Genoa in the fourteenth century.
• The Mandylion of Rome, long kept at San Silvestro in Capite and now in the Vatican.

Both are faces painted on cloth mounted on board in later frames. Neither has been scientifically dated, and art historians generally date both to the Middle Ages.

The Shroud theory

In 1978 the writer Ian Wilson argued that the Mandylion was actually the Shroud of Turin (V04), folded so that only the face showed. This would give the Shroud a history before its first appearance in France around 1354. The theory is attractive to Shroud supporters, but most historians find it unproven: the Mandylion was consistently described as a face on a small cloth, and the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud (itself contested) places it in the Middle Ages.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Acheiropoieta. The Mandylion is the model of the acheiropoieton, an image "not made by hands". Such images answered a theological question: if Christ himself made his image, then images of him could be holy, not idols. This mattered greatly in the Iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

The icon of the Holy Face. In Orthodox art the Mandylion became a standard icon: Christ's face on a white cloth, often held by angels, placed over church doors and on battle standards.

A city's protector. At Edessa and later at Constantinople the image was a palladium, a sacred object that protected the city, like the Ark of the Covenant (V07) in Israel's wars.

Connections

Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60) and Patristic Christianity (ch22). Compare the Shroud of Turin (V04), the Veil of Veronica (V25), the Sudarium of Oviedo (V24) and the Tilma of Guadalupe (V13), other images claimed as not made by hands.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/holy-mandylion.html