are Christian icons that are said to have come into existence miraculously, and not created by humans. They are also called icons made without hands. Invariably, these are images of Jesus or Mary, usually the Virgin and Child. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the most notable examples are the Mandylion, also known as the Image of Edessa, and the Hodegetria.
In Western Christianity, the most notable claimed examples are the Shroud of Turin, Veil of Veronica, Tilma from Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Manoppello Image. The term is often applied to the image's content, and thus used for what are known to be normal human copies of originals believed to have been miraculously created.
Although the most famous today are mostly icons painted on wood panel, they exist in other media, such as mosaics, painted tile, and cloth. Ernst Kitzinger distinguished two types: "Either they are images believed to have been made by hands other than those of ordinary mortals or else they are claimed to be mechanical, though miraculous, impressions of the original".Kitzinger, 113 The belief in such images became prominent only in the 6th century, by the end of which both the Mandylion and the Image of Camuliana were well known. The anonymous pilgrim of Piacenza was shown a relic of the Veil of Veronica type in Memphis, Egypt, in the 570s.Kitzinger, 113–114
Etymology The term () is transliterated from the Medieval Greek , . The singular form is .
Background Such images functioned as powerful relics as well as icons, and their images were naturally seen as especially authoritative as to the true appearance of the subject. Like other icon types believed to be painted from the live subject, such as the Hodegetria (thought to have been painted by Luke the Evangelist), they therefore acted as important references for other images in the tradition. They were therefore copied on an enormous scale, and the belief that such images existed and authenticated certain facial types played an important role in the conservatism of iconographic traditions such as the depiction of Jesus.Grigg, throughout Beside, and conflated with, the developed legend of the Image of Edessa, was the tale of the Veil of Veronica, whose name was wrongly interpreted in a typical case of popular etymology to mean "true icon" or "true image", the fear of a "false image" remaining strong.
A further and larger group of images, sometimes overlapping with in popular tradition, were believed in the Early Middle Ages to have been created by conventional means in New Testament times, often by New Testament figures who, like many monks of the later period, were believed to have practiced as artists. The best known of these, and the most commonly credited in the West, was Luke the Evangelist, long thought to have had Mary sit for her portrait.
In the East, several other figures were believed by many to have created images, including narrative ones. Saint Peter was said to have "illustrated his own account of the Transfiguration", Luke to have illustrated an entire Gospel Book, and the late 7th century Frankish pilgrim Arculf reported seeing in the Holy Land a cloth woven or embroidered by the Virgin herself with figures of Jesus and the apostles. The Apostles were also said to have been very active as patrons, commissioning cycles in illuminated manuscripts and fresco in their churches.Grigg, 5–6, 5 quoted
Such beliefs projected contemporary practices back to the 1st century, and in their developed form are not found before the lead-up to the Iconoclastic Controversy, but in the 4th century, Eusebius, who disapproved of images, accepted that "the features of His apostles Peter and Paul, and indeed of Christ himself, have been preserved in coloured portraits which I have examined". Many famous images, including the Image of Edessa and Hodegetria, were described in versions of their stories as this type of image. The belief that images presumably of the 6th century at the earliest were authentic products of the 1st century distorted any sense of stylistic anachronism, making it easier for further images to be accepted, just as the belief in , which must have reflected a divine standard of realism and accuracy, distorted early medieval perceptions of what degree of realism was possible in art, accounting for the praise very frequently given to images for their realism, when to modern eyes the surviving corpus has little of this. The standard depictions of both the features of the leading New Testament figures, and the iconography of key narrative scenes, seemed to have their authenticity confirmed by images believed to have been created either by direct witnesses or those able to hear the accounts of witnesses, or God himself or his angels.
Acheiropoieta of 836 Such icons were seen as powerful arguments against iconoclasm. In a document apparently produced in the circle of the Patriarch of Constantinople, which purports to be the record of a (fictitious) Church council of 836, a list of and icons miraculously protected is given as evidence for divine approval of icons. The listed are:
the Image of Edessa, described as still at Edessa; the image of the Virgin at Lod, which was said to have miraculously appeared imprinted on a column of a church built by the apostles Peter and John; another image of the Virgin, three cubits high, at Lod in Israel, which was said to have miraculously appeared in another church.
The nine other miracles listed deal with the maintenance rather than creation of icons, which resist or repair the attacks of assorted pagans, Arabs, Jews, Persians, scoffers, madmen, and iconoclasts.
This list seems to have had a regional bias, as other then-famous images are not mentioned, such as the Image of Camuliana, later brought to the capital. Another example, and the only one which indisputably still exists, is the mosaic icon of Christ of Latomos in Thessaloniki. This was covered by plaster during the Iconoclastic period, towards the end of which an earthquake caused the plaster to fall down, revealing the image (during the reign of Leo V, 813–820). However, this was only a subsidiary miracle, according to the account extant. This says that the mosaic was being constructed secretly, during the 4th century persecution of Galerius, as an image of the Virgin, when it suddenly was transformed overnight into the present image of Christ.Grigg, 6; Cormac
Notable examples
Image of Edessa
According to Christian legend, the image of Edessa, (known to the Eastern Orthodox Church as the Mandylion, a Medieval Greek word not applied in any other context), was a holy relic consisting of a square or rectangle of cloth upon which a miraculous image of the face of Jesus was imprinted—the first icon ("image"). According to legend, Abgar V wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Abgar received an answering letter from Jesus, declining the invitation, but promising a future visit by one of his disciples. Along with the letter went a likeness of Jesus. This legend was first recorded in the early fourth century by Eusebius,Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 1.13.5 and .22. who said that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. Instead, Thaddeus of Edessa, one of the seventy disciples, is said to have come to Edessa, bearing the words of Jesus, by the virtues of which the king was miraculously healed.
The first record of the existence of a physical image in the ancient city of Edessa (now Şanlıurfa) was in Evagrius Scholasticus, writing about 600, who reports a portrait of Christ, of divine origin (), which effected the miraculous aid in the defence of Edessa against the Persians in 544.Evagrius, in Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologia Graecalxxxvi, 2, cols. 2748f, noted by Runciman 1931, p. 240, note 5; remarking that "the portrait of Christ has entered the class of αχειροποίητοι icons". The image was moved to Constantinople in the 10th century. The cloth disappeared from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade [Sack of Constantinople] in 1204, reappearing as a relic in King Louis IX of France's Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. It finally disappeared in the French Revolution.Two documentary inventories: year 1534 (Gerard of St. Quentin de l'Isle, Paris) and year 1740. See Grove Dictionary of Art, Steven Runciman, Some Remarks on the Image of Edessa, Cambridge Historical Journal 1931, and Shroud.com for a list of the group of relics. See also an image of the Gothic reliquary dating from the 13th century , in Histor.ws .
The Ancha icon in Georgia is reputed to be the Keramidion, another 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.
Image of Camuliana
Although it is now little known, having probably been destroyed in the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm,Beckwith, 88, although identifies it with the Veil of Veronica and Manoppello Image: Heinrich Pfeiffer, "The concept of "acheiropoietos", the iconography of the face of Christ and the veil of Manoppello", in di Lazzaro, the icon of Christ from Camuliana in Cappadocia was the most famous Greek example, certainly from the time it reached Constantinople in 574, after which it was used as a palladium in battles by Philippikos, Priscus and Heraclius, and in the Pannonian Avar Siege of Constantinople in 626, and praised by George of Pisidia.Kitzinger, 111-112; Emerick, 356-357. Most fully covered by Von Dobschütz, like most of the images here
Lateran Palace image in Rome
This image, also called the Uronica,B.M. Bolton, "Advertise the Message: Images in Rome at the Turn of the Twelfth Century", in D. Wood (ed) The Church and the Arts (Oxford, 1992) is kept in what was once the pope's private chapel, in a room now known as the Sancta Sanctorum at the top of the Scala Sancta in a surviving part of the old Lateran Palace in Rome. The legend is that this image was begun by Luke the Evangelist and finished by angels.
It is thought that the icon was painted in Rome between the 5th and 6th century. Today only slight traces under overpainting remain of the original image of a Christ in Majesty with a crossed halo, in the classic pose of the Teacher holding the Scroll of the Law in his left hand while his right is raised in benediction. Many times restored, the face completely changed when Pope Alexander III (1159–1181) had the present one, painted on silk, placed over the original. Innocent III (1189–1216) covered the rest of the holy icon with an embossed silver riza, but other later embellishments completely covered its surface. It has also been cleaned during the recent restoration.
The doors protecting the icon, also in embossed silver, are of the 15th century. It has a baldachin in metal and gilded wood over it, replacing the one by Caradaossi (1452–1527) lost during the sack of Rome in 1527. The image itself was last inspected by the Jesuit art historian J. Wilpert in 1907.
As early as the reign of Pope Sergius I (687–701) there are records of the image being carried in annual procession at certain feasts, and Pope Stephen II (752–757) carried the image on his shoulders in a procession to counter a threat from the Lombards. By the ninth century its elaborate procession had become a focus of the Feast of the Assumption. In the Middle Ages the Pope and the seven cardinal-bishops would celebrate masses in the small sanctuary where it was housed, and at times would kiss its feet. Although no longer a specific liturgical object, some Romans still venerate this icon, considering it a last hope in disasters and memorable events in the capital, a veneration which can be compared with that for the other ancient icon of the in Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, again in Rome. The former icon used to be taken across Rome annually in procession to "meet" the latter on the Feast of the Assumption.
The Veil of Veronica