Image of Edessa

The Image of Edessa, known in Greek as the Mandylion, was one of the most venerated relics of the Byzantine world: a cloth said to carry the face of Christ imprinted without human painting, the archetype of the acheiropoieta. Its fame rested on the legend of Abgar, the toparch of Edessa in Mesopotamia, who was believed to have written to Jesus asking for healing and to have received in return a miraculous portrait. As the model "true likeness," the image did much to fix the bearded, frontal type of Christ that became standard in icons. Unlike most relics in this collection, the Mandylion is no longer extant: it can be traced with confidence only as far as its disappearance during the sack of Constantinople in 1204, after which its fate is unknown, making it a lost object known chiefly through texts and through the icons it inspired.

Tradition holds that King Abgar of Edessa, gravely ill, wrote to Jesus asking him to come and heal him, and that Jesus sent back either a letter or, in the fuller later version of the legend, a cloth bearing a miraculously imprinted image of his face, the Mandylion, which cured the king. The legend is first attested, in its earlier letter-only form, by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, with the miraculous image itself appearing in the surviving textual tradition considerably later, a documented development of the story over time rather than a single fixed account from its earliest attestation.

The correspondence between Abgar and Jesus is reported by the church historian Eusebius in the early fourth century, though he mentions only letters, not an image. A physical cloth image at Edessa is first described near the end of the sixth century by Evagrius Scholasticus, who says it delivered the city from a Persian siege in 544. The relic remained at Edessa until 944, when the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos secured it by negotiation and had it carried to Constantinople in a great celebration, placing it in the Pharos Chapel of the imperial palace among the most precious relics of the empire. There it stayed until the Fourth Crusade, when Latin armies took and looted the city in 1204 and the Mandylion disappeared from the record. A cloth later kept in the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris and lost in the Revolution may or may not have been the same object.

The Mandylion was ceremonially translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 CE, a major event in Byzantine court and religious life, and it disappears from the historical record after the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204, its fate thereafter unknown. The British author Ian Wilson has proposed that the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are one and the same object, folded in a way that displayed only the face, which would account for its disappearance from Byzantine records shortly before the Shroud's own documented appearance in France in the 1350s; this identification is not accepted as scholarly consensus among Byzantine art historians, and it leaves an unexplained gap of roughly a century and a half between the 1204 sack and the Shroud's first securely documented Western appearance.

In the Eastern tradition the Mandylion was received as a genuine, miraculously produced likeness of Christ, and it carried immense authority in the theology of images, especially after the iconoclastic controversies. Historically, the evidence is textual and late: the earliest layer of the Abgar story speaks only of letters, the physical image enters the record in the sixth century, and its miraculous origin is a matter of belief rather than demonstration.

Because the object vanished in 1204, no scientific examination is possible, and modern scholarship, surveyed for example in Mark Guscin's study of the Byzantine sources, treats it as a relic whose history can be documented but whose authenticity cannot be tested. Some writers have speculatively linked the Mandylion to the Shroud of Turin, folded to show only the face, but this remains conjectural. The image is therefore classed as debated in authenticity and lost in existence.