Grace Gibbs DuPree
Emory University
The tradition of the Mandylion, the icon of the face of Christ “acheiropoietos,” was recorded first in Eusebius and translated for the Latin-speaking West by Rufinus. Devotion to this image – both in the Mandylion and in the version known as the “Veronica” of Rome – exploded after the 1204 sacking of Constantinople when it was brought to the Sainte-Chapelle along with a flood of the imperial chapel’s most precious relics. But though the period after 1204 witnessed a flowering of devotion, the image was known in the West before then. The Old French Vie de St. Alexis in the 12th-century St. Albans Psalter relies on the imagine of Edessa as a major plot point: St. Alexis abandons his wealthy home and bride in Rome, traveling as a poor pilgrim to Edessa, where he encounters the image and is transformed into the likeness of Christ. The motif of the Holy Face of Christ is woven throughout the illuminated initials of the Psalter, where the transformative power of Christ’s gaze is repeatedly emphasized.
This paper traces the devotional progression as the image moved from the Greek East to the Latin West, and the changes in its meaning during that shift. The Mandylion functioned in the Greek-speaking world as a standard of communitarian identity and victory – victory over the Persians and the Jacobites in 544, over iconoclasts in the 8th century, over Muslims in the 10th century. But in its westward shift, the Holy Face became not a gaze turned outward against enemies but a gaze turned upon the viewer in a relationship of intimacy and interiority, inspiring individual spiritual progress and personal connection with Christ. The Vie de St. Alexis and the illuminations of the St. Albans Psalter mark the first appearance of this version of the Mandylion tradition in the visual and poetic vocabulary of western Europe.