Mandylion

The tradition of the sacred image is related to established prototypes […] handed down in Christian art, the most important [of which] is the acheiropoietos ("not made by human hands") image of the Christ on the Mandilion. It is said that the Christ gave His image, imprinted on a piece of fabric, to the messengers of the King of Edessa, Abgar, who had asked Him for His portrait. The Mandilion had been preserved at Constantinople until it disappeared when the town was pillaged by the Latin Crusaders. A copy of the Mandilion is preserved in the cathedral of Laon.

The special nature of Orthodox icons was emphasized by the growth of a notion, much encouraged by these bitter disputes, that there was one quite exceptional class of art: acheiropoieta, images of Jesus not made by human hands, the archetype of which was the now-mysterious Mandylion given by Christ himself to King Abgar of Edessa […].

According to a sixth-century legend, King Abgar Ukamâ of Edessa fell ill. Hearing about a healer named Jesus, he sent for the holy man and promised to become his follower. Christ learned of this and praised Abgar for having faith without visual evidence. Unable to travel to Edessa, Christ sent a likeness of himself produced miraculously on a cloth or mandylion (from Arabic mandil, "veil," and Latin mantele, "towel" or "napkin"). Abgar was cured, and the mandylion remained in Edessa until 544, when its magic turned back the invading Persians from the gates of the now-Christian city.

These legends not only established the value of the Mandylion and the Vera Icon as authentic portraits of Christ, but also as acheiropoieta, i.e., images made without the intervention of human hands.

In St. Barbara in Khé, a thirteenth-century Georgian church, the Mandylion is painted on the wall behind the altar, […]

We know the history of the transfer of the mandilion of Edessa to Constantinople from the text ascribed to Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913/944–959).

The mandylion became not just a holy relic but an image to be copied, either as textile or as iconographic type on a hard surface: a painted icon of a mandylion with Christ's face on it. Furthermore it became a theological prototype. Just as the mandylion bore the impression of the incarnate God on its surface and became a vessel of divine healing, so all icons bear witness to the power of matter to reveal divinity and of revealed divinity to effect eternal salvation.