The Mandylion, the Image of Edessa

The most famous of the chapel's images was the Mandylion, a cloth bearing the face of Christ that Byzantine tradition held was not painted by any human hand, an acheiropoieton. Its legend told of King Abgar of Edessa, who wrote to Jesus asking for healing and received in return a cloth miraculously imprinted with his features.

Kept for centuries at Edessa in Mesopotamia, the image was ceremonially transferred to Constantinople in 944 amid great celebration and installed among the Passion relics in the Pharos chapel, together with the Keramion, a roof-tile said to bear the same face. The Mandylion shaped the standard Byzantine way of depicting the face of Christ and became a model for icons across the Orthodox world. It disappeared during or after the Latin sack of 1204 and was never securely traced again; various later objects, including a cloth once at the French royal chapel and lost in the Revolution, have been proposed as the same image, and some writers have even linked the Mandylion to the Shroud of Turin, though no such identification is established. In this atlas the Image of Edessa is recorded as a lost artifact last securely attested here, at Constantinople.