The Holy See

The elaborate seventeenth-century mounting that frames and crowns the likeness of Christ's face provides a brilliant contrast to the dark, almost invisible portrait and, simultaneously, establishes its aspect as a relic within a reliquary. The painting seems to have been made as a replacement for a nearly identical icon in Genoa (San Bartolomeo degli Armeni),most likely when the latter was enclosed in its fourteenth century frame.

The Vatican and Genoa faces both replicate Byzantium's most venerated icon, the Mandylion, claimed to have been created when a painter dispatched to the Holy Land by King Abgar of Edessa (Urfa in modern Turkey) was unable to capture Christ's visage using traditional artistic means because of the radiance emanating from the divine face. Washing his face and drying it on a towel, the Lord effected the portrait's miraculous transfer onto the cloth. When the Mandylion was brought back to Edessa, it cured Abgar of leprosy, acting as if it were Christ himself, who had left actual relics behind when he ascended to heaven.

Continuing a tradition in which pilgrims captured the aura of relics by touching them with cloths (brandea), the Mandylion was then no ordinary painting. An acheiropoieton, that is, an image "not made by human hands," it hovered between being a picture and a touch-relic, an aspect captured by the portrait, which seems to be dyed into the cloth without clear contours except those made by the gold mat superimposed on it. Like a shadow, the Mandylion reminds viewers that Christ was once present and visible on earth but has returned to his Father, and, in so doing, it conjures up both the human Jesus and his ineffable divinity.

Although the Mandylion was believed to be capable of replicating itself when cloths or other substances were laid on top of it, the miraculously made image continued to attract pilgrims to Edessa until it was rescued from the Moslemcontrolled city by Emperor Constantine VII (r. 905-959) and installed with ten relics of Christ's Passion in the imperial palace in Constantinople. It was displayed in the Pharos Chapel with the tablets given to Moses on Mt. Sinai and once treasured in the Ark of the Covenant, which the tenth-century account of the Mandylion's transfer to as "the other, less elevated ark." Indeed, the Baroque angel-frame may have been intended to evoke the cherubim that watched over the great Jewish reliquary chest. In the medieval setting, the association with the tablet of the law containing a prohibition of images, the Mandylion realized the fundamental theological argument that God's covenant with the Jews, given in words, had been superseded by the incarnate Christ whose dual nature enabled both relics and images.

Reference: Martina Bagnoli and Holger Klein, et al., eds., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 198-199.