The Icon of the Holy Face in Laon

According to a legend that hasn’t been confirmed, Jacques Pantaléon of Troyes, the former archdeacon of Laon Cathedral and the future Pope Urban IV, sent the icon of the Holy Face to the convent of Montreuil-les-Dames in 1249. But dependable sources—notably a text from 1467, which mentions the worship of the image—only attest to the presence of the icon in Montreuil from the fifteenth century. Shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century, the nuns settled in a suburb of Laon, where they kept the icon until 1795, the year in which the icon of the Holy Face was moved to Laon Cathedral.

The icon is obviously Slavic in origin because of the inscription ‘the image of the Lord on the sudarium-shroud’ in Slavonic. The contacts that existed between the Slavic countries and Rome during the first half of the thirteenth century facilitated the icon’s arrival in Rome during this period, and therefore its dispatch to Laon in 1249.

The haloed head of Christ on the icon stands out against the gold background, on which is painted a veil comprised of a network of red lines, forming a cross decorated with stylized fleurons and lozenges. Unlike examples from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which the head of Christ is represented on a piece of hung cloth with creases, the cloth in the Holy Face of Laon is completely taut and only has fringes along the lower edge. These characteristics obviously show that the Holy Face of Laon belongs to a category of representations of the image of Edessa, which is generally agreed to have existed towards the end of the twelfth century. A typical example of this form of representation is the Novgorod icon, which is held in the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow).

This very distinctive iconography—Christ’s face standing out against a piece of cloth—shows that the Laon icon belongs to a category of images destined to reproduce the image of Edessa in Syria (Şanlıurfa in Turkey). According to a legend that had already been related by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, King Abgar V Ukkama of Osroene (‘the black’), a contemporary of Christ who corresponded with him, sent his messenger Hannan to Jesus, asking him to come to Edessa and cure him of a serious illness. According to one version of the legend, Christ was unable to go to Edessa, and therefore sent an imprint of his face on a piece of cloth to King Abgar of Edessa to satisfy his wish and heal him. In so doing, Christ himself ‘authorized’ the representation of his face in human form, which makes this image into a miraculous image and places it in the ranks of the acheiropoietes (works not made by human hands). Possessing apotropaic and curative qualities, these images provided protection and played an active role in the Empire’s political and military events. An example is the image of Edessa, which is said to have saved the city during the Persian siege in 554. When Edessa was reconquered in 944 under the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the image of Edessa was carried with great pomp to Constantinople and placed in the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos, one of the chapels in the imperial palace. The French eventually seized the image of Edessa during the city’s occupation by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century and took it to the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris. It appears that it probably disappeared in the upheavals of the Revolution, although attempts have been made to compare it to the famous ‘Turin Shroud’.