Image of Edessa

The story of the Mandylion is likely the product of centuries of development. The first version is found in Eusebius' 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 King Abgar 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. 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". 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." The Syriac Chronicle of Edessa written in 540-550 also claim divine interventions in the siege, but does not mention the Image. Some fifty years later, Evagrius Scholasticus in his Ecclesiastical History (593) is the first to mention a role for the image in the relief of the siege, 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 was Acheiropoietos (, ) is a separate enrichment of the original legend: similar legends of supernatural origins have accrued to other Orthodox icons. The Ancha icon is reputed to be the Keramidion, another acheiropoietos recorded from an early period, miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ by contact with the Mandylion. To art historians it is a Georgian icon of the 6th-7th century. According to the Golden Legend, which is a collection of hagiographies compiled by Jacobus 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: ==Later events==

The Holy Mandylion disappeared again after the Sassanians conquered Edessa in 609. A local legend, related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visited Urfa (Edessa) in 1997, relates that the towel or burial cloth ( ) of Jesus was thrown into a well in what is today the city's Great Mosque. is at variance with this, John Scylitzes recounting how in 944, when the city was besieged by John Kourkouas, it was exchanged for a group of Muslim prisoners. At that time the Image of Edessa was taken to Constantinople where it was received amidst great celebration by emperor Romanos I Lekapenos, who deposited it in the Theotokos of the Pharos chapel in the Great Palace of Constantinople. Not inconsequentially, the earliest known Byzantine icon of the Mandylion or Holy Face, preserved at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, is dated c. 945. 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 the Shroud 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. A small part of a relic, believed to be the same as this, was one of the large group sold by Baldwin II of Constantinople to Louis IX of France in 1241 and housed in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (not to be confused with the Sainte Chapelle at Chambéry, home for a time of the Shroud of Turin) until it disappeared during the French Revolution. File:Cathedral of the Holy Mandylion (Andronikov Monastery) 10.jpg|The katholikon of Andronikov Monastery is the oldest building in Moscow (outside the Kremlin) and one of numerous Russian churches dedicated to the Holy Mandylion File:Christos Acheiropoietos.jpg|The Saviour Not Made by Hands, an icon of the Novgorod school, ==Surviving images==

Three images survive today which are associated with the Mandylion. Shroud of Turin Author Ian 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. Wilson cites documents in the Vatican Library and the University of Leiden, Netherlands, which seem to suggest the presence of another image at Edessa. A 10th-century codex, Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69, found by Gino Zaninotto in the Vatican 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" (). Holy Face of Genoa This image is kept in the Church of St Bartholomew of The Armenians in Genoa, Italy. In the 14th century it was donated to the doge of Genoa Leonardo Montaldo by the Byzantine Emperor John 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, giving a terminus 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. The similarity of the image with the Veil of Veronica suggests a link between the two traditions. Holy Face of San Silvestro This image was kept in Rome's church of San Silvestro in Capite, attached to a convent of Poor Clares, up to 1870, and is now kept in the Matilda chapel in the Vatican Palace. It is housed in a Baroque frame added by Sister Dionora Chiarucci, head of the convent, in 1623. 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. Image:Holy Face - Genoa.jpg|The Holy Face of Genoa. Image:Sainte Face - Genes.jpg|The Holy Face of Genoa with the face more visible. Image:39bMandylion.jpg|The image from San Silvestro (Matilda chapel in the Vatican Palace). Image:Mandylion visage.jpg|The San Silvestro image with the face more visible. ==Veil of Veronica==

, c. 1470 Historian Rebecca Rist says that devotion to Saint Veronica was encouraged by Pope Innocent III in part to compete with Constantinople's Mandylion and increase the prestige of Rome and its pope by claiming a similar acheiropoieta, the Veil of Veronica. In later Western European tradition the main likeness of the face of Jesus not made by human hand (i.e., an acheiropoieton), 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 pherenike ("bearer of blessing" in Greek), and the late appearance of this legend, has increased the scepticism of scholars. A cloth believed to exist today in the Vatican is supposed to have been brought back to Italy at the time of the Crusades. The Veil of Veronica (, '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 the Volto 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. Accounts of the Veil of Veronica and the Image of Edessa are sometimes confused by scholars. ==See also==

• Cameron, Averil. "The History of the Image of Edessa: The Telling of a Story." Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (Okeanos: Essays presented to Ihor Sevcenko on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students) (1983): 80-94. • • Eusebius of Caesarea. "Epistle of Jesus Christ to Abgarus King of Edessa". Historia Ecclesiae. • Eisenman, Robert, 1997. James the Brother of Jesus. (Viking Penguin). In part a deconstruction of the legends surrounding Agbar/Abgar. • Hall, James, ''Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art'', 1996 (2nd edn.), John Murray, • Kitzinger, Ernst, "The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm", Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 8, (1954), pp. 83–150, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, . • • Fiction referencing the Mandyllon. • ==Further reading==