The Science of Miracles

by Joe Nickell

  While “the thin layer of pigment showed no traces of overpainting,” there were nonetheless “alterations in the execution of the nose, mouth, and eyes” that were “observed in the x-rays and thermographic and reflectographic photographs.” Specifically, the nose had once been shorter, “so that the image originally must have had a different physiognomy” (“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 57–58).

  The museums’ scholars learned (according to “Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 56):

  The version in the Vatican and the one in Genoa are almost wholly identical in their representation, form, technique, and measurements. Indeed, they must at some point in their history have crossed paths, for the rivet holes that surround the Genoese image coincide with those that attach the Vatican Mandylion to the cutout sheet of silver that frames the image…. So this silver frame, or one like to it, must also have originally covered the panel in Genoa.

  ICONOGRAPHY

  The Mandylion clearly has been copied and recopied, as if the different versions were just so many “icons” (as they are now called). It is not surprising that many of them appeared. According to Thomas Humber (1978, 92), “Soon the popular demand for more copies representing the ‘true likeness’ of Christ was such that selected artists were allowed or encouraged to make duplications.” Indeed, “there was, conveniently, another tradition supporting the copies: the Image could miraculously duplicate itself.”

  Because icons were traditionally painted on wood, the fact that both the Vatican and Genoese Mandylions are on linen suggests that each was intended to be regarded as the original Edessan image. That image was described in the tenth-century account as “a moist secretion without coloring or painter's art,” an “impression” of Jesus’ face on “linen cloth” that—as is the way of legend—“eventually became indestructible” (quoted in Wilson 1979, 273).

  While the original image appears lost to history, Ian Wilson (1979, 119–21) goes so far as to argue that the Edessan image has survived—indeed, that it is nothing less than the Shroud of Turin, the alleged burial cloth of Jesus! To the obvious rejoinder that the early Mandylions bore only a facial image whereas the Turin “shroud” bears full-length frontal and dorsal images, Wilson argues that the latter may have been folded in such a way as to exhibit only the face. Also there is an eighth-century account of King Abgar receiving a cloth with the image of Jesus’ whole body (“Image of Edessa” 2008). Unfortunately, the Turin cloth has no provenance prior to the mid-fourteenth century when—according to a later bishop's report to the pope—an artist confessed it was his handiwork. Indeed, the image is rendered in red ocher and vermilion tempera paint—not as a positive image but as a negative one, as if it were a bodily imprint. Moreover, the cloth has been radiocarbon dated to the time of the forger's confession (Nickell 1998). (Another image-bearing shroud—of Besançon, France—did not come from Constantinople in 1204 as alleged but was clearly a sixteenth-century copy of the Turin fake [Nickell 1998, 64].)

  The evidence is lacking, therefore, that any of these figured cloths ever bore a “not-made-by-hands” image. Instead, they have evolved from unlikely legend to Edessan portrait to self-duplicating Mandylions to proliferating “Veronicas” to full-length body image—all supposedly of the living Jesus—and thence to imaged “shrouds” with simulated frontal and dorsal bodily imprints. Finally, modern science and scholarship have revealed the truth about these pious deceptions.

  It was like déjà-vu. As discussed in the previous chapter, in 2008, in a traveling exhibition called “Vatican Splendors,” I had seen the Holy Mandylion, also known as the Image of Edessa, which was once held to be the miraculous self-portrait of Christ (Nickell 2009). Now, in Genoa the following year, I was seeing another such image and recalling how in the Dark Ages the Image was said to be able to miraculously duplicate itself—one way to explain how there could be so many “originals.”

  PIOUS LEGEND

  The original, according to legend, was produced for King Abgar of Edessa after he sent a messenger, Ananias, with a letter to Jesus requesting a cure for the king's leprosy. If Jesus was unable to come, Ananias was instructed, he was to bring the holy man's portrait instead. But as Ananias attempted to paint a picture Jesus himself intervened, washing his face in water and inexplicably imprinting his visage on a towel—hence the name Mandylion, a unique word of Byzantine Greek coinage describing a holy facecloth (Wilson 1979, 272–90; “Mandylion of Edessa” 2008).

  Alas, this legend is unknown before the fourth century; moreover, there are conflicting versions. One attributes the image to the bloody sweat exuded by Jesus during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). A later legend holds that a woman named Veronica, who pitied Jesus as he struggled with his cross on the way to his crucifixion, gave him her veil or kerchief with which to wipe his bloody, sweaty face. In fact, however, this made-up tale obviously derives from the fact that Veronica is simply a corruption of vera iconica, medieval Latin for “true images” (Nickell 2007, 71–76). In one revealing fourth-century text of the Edessan legend, the image is not claimed as miraculous but instead merely the work of Hannan (Ananias), who “painted a portrait of Jesus in choice paints” and gave it to the king (quoted in Wilson 1979, 130).

  Astonishingly, many Shroud of Turin devotees, following Ian Wilson (1979, 119–21), believe the “shroud” is the lost original of the Edessan image! How do they equate the latter's face-only image with the full-length, front-and-back bodily images of the Turin cloth? They imagine the shroud was folded so that only the face showed—never mind its lack of record for over thirteen centuries, a bishop's report of the forger's confession, pigments and paint that make up the image and “blood,” and radiocarbon dating to the time of the forger's confession: about the middle of the fourteenth century (Nickell 1998; 2007) (see chapter 18).

  COMPETING MANDYLIONS

  According to the authoritative source The Dictionary of Art (Turner 1996), the Edessan image “entered Christian iconography during the 11th and 12th centuries, first in manuscript picture cycles that were elaborated to accompany narratives of the Edessan legend and then as part of a fixed scheme of images in church decoration.” As we saw in the previous chapter, three of these “original” Mandylions have received the most attention, each supposedly having been the very one brought to Constantinople in 1204 by crusaders. One, the Parisian Mandylion, was acquired by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century and became lost in 1792, probably destroyed in the French Revolution.

  Of the two surviving examples, the Vatican Mandylion has no certain history prior to the sixteenth century. In 1517 the nuns of San Silvestro in Capito were reportedly forbidden to exhibit it so that it would not compete with their church's “Veronica” (Wilson 1991). The Vatican now concedes (in the official Vatican Splendors exhibit text [“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008]) that “the Mandylion is no longer enveloped today by any legend of its origin as an image made without the intervention of human hands.” I understand this to be an admission not only that the Vatican version is merely an artist's rendering, but also that such is true of all Mandylions.

  This brings us to the other surviving image, the Genoese Mandylion. It, too, lacks meaningful provenance. It is allegedly traceable to the tenth century, but its verifiable history dates only from 1362. At that time Byzantine emperor John V donated it to Genoa's Doge Leonardo Montaldo after whose death in 1384 it was bequeathed to the Genoese Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians. It arrived there in 1388; that is where it remains and where I photographed it (figure 17.1), displayed in a gilt-silver enameled frame of the fourteenth-century Palaeologan style.

  Interestingly, fragments of ancient Persian and Arabian fabrics were found stuck on the back of the Genoese icon panel. The Arabian fragment is from the sixteenth century, whereas the figural silk Persian one has been attributed to the tenth century on stylistic grounds. However, radiocarbon testing of the wood gave a more reliable date range of 1240–1280 (Wolf 2005).

  SIMILARITIES


  Both the Vatican and the Genoese Mandylions are painted (the Genoese in egg tempera, the Vatican apparently the same) on linen cloth that has been glued to a wood panel (“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008; Church of St. Bartholomeo degli Armeni 2009; Wilson 1991, 113–14, 137–38). However, both X-rays and tomography (an X-ray technique whereby selected planes are photographed) reveal that the Genoese image-bearing cloth covers an original image painted on wood (Bozzo 1994). Also, the Vatican's on-cloth image shows alterations (in X-rays and reflectographic and thermographic photographs), especially in the nose, which was originally shorter, “so that the image originally must have had a different physiognomy” (“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 58).

  In 1996, the Vatican Museum's experts concluded (according to “Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 58):

  The version in the Vatican and the one in Genoa are almost wholly identical in their representation, form, technique, and measurements. Indeed, they must at some point in their history have crossed paths, for the rivet holes that surround the Genoese image coincide with those that attach the Vatican Mandylion to the cutout sheet of silver that frames the image…. So this silver frame, or one like to it must also have originally covered in the Genoa.

  See my summary comparison of the two Mandylions (table 17.1 [based on “Mandylion of Edessa” 2008; Bozzo 1974; Wolf 2005]).

  Indeed, the images themselves, as they now appear to the eye, are remarkably alike. Measurement ratios—involving the most critical areas: the eyes, lengthy nose, and mouth—are strikingly similar. Therefore, when photographs of the images are brought to the same scale (based on interpupillary distance), those features effectively superimpose, as I determined by using computer-generated transparencies. (These were prepared by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga using photos taken by art experts [Wilson 1991, plates 13 and 14]. However, the lack of a forensic scale in each prevents reaching a definite conclusion as to whether tracing might have been involved.)

  CONCLUSIONS

  Since the prototypical image for the later Mandylions and “Veronicas” first appeared in Constantinople in the tenth century, many copies have been made. In one known seventeenth-century instance, no fewer than six “exact” facsimiles were carefully made. Such replicas could later be mistaken for or misrepresented as the original, as happened, for example, with one that was specially made and sent to plague-ridden Venice in the 1470s; it later became known as the Holy Face of Alicante in Spain (Wilson 1991, 101–108).

  Perhaps this is what occurred in the case of the two existing Mandylions. The Genoese image, with its older provenance and two-stage creation, appears to be the earliest. Its original image was certainly an artist's copy, since it was painted not on cloth but directly on the wood panel. (One source reports that it has the same dimensions as the missing central panel of a triptych in the St. Catharine's Monastery at Mount Sinai [Wolf 2005].)

  Vatican experts acknowledge the evidence suggesting that their Mandylion is “a later replica of the one now in Genoa; that it was produced in the fourteenth century, when the Genoese version…was given its existing Palaeologan frame; and that it was then placed in the silver frame of the older version,” thus explaining the matched rivet holes (“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 57). Their main reservation is that the alterations in the Vatican image's features (especially the nose) may be inconsistent with a simple, direct copy. However, it would seem that the alterations might be due only to the image having been alternately painted and corrected in the freehand process of copying it. Expert examination, in fact, showed “no signs of overpainting” (“Mandylion of Edessa” 2008, 57).

  In brief, then, the totality of evidence is most consistent with the hypothesis that the Genoan Mandylion is a replica, made no earlier than the thirteenth century, and that the Vatican Mandylion is a fourteenth-century copy of that replica. There is no proof that either was directly copied from the now-lost tenth-century “original,” and instead there is proof against it. Neither is there any credible evidence that there was an authentic first-century image of Jesus—miraculous or otherwise. The Shroud of Turin is not such an original, having been proven to be the work of a confessed forger in the middle of the fourteenth century. Thus, the shroud image simply followed the traditional likeness and not the other way around.

  Table 17.1

  Mandylions

  Criteria Vatican Genoese

  Radiocarbon date None 1240–1280

  Verifiable provenance From 1517 From 1362

  Painting medium Tempera (unconfirmed) Egg tempera

  Support Linen affixed to wood panel (cedar) Linen affixed to wood panel (cedar or poplar)

  Process of execution Has image corrections (e.g., nose once shorter) Retouched image on cloth

  covers original painted on wood

  Inner frame measurements About 11½ × 8 inches. About 11½ × 8 inches.

  Positions of rivet holes (despite different frames) Match Genoese frame Match Vatican frame

  Date of frame Uncertain; mounted in 1623 baroque reliquary (by Francesco Comi) fourteenth-century style

  The Shroud of Turin continues to be the subject of media presentations that treat it as being so mysterious as to imply a supernatural origin. One recent study (Binga 2001) found only ten credible skeptical books on the topic versus over four hundred promoting the cloth as the authentic, or potentially authentic, burial cloth of Jesus—including a revisionist tome, The Resurrection of the Shroud (Antonacci 2000). Yet since the cloth appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century it has been at the center of scandal, exposés, and controversy—a dubious legacy for what is purported to be the most holy relic in Christendom.

  BOGUS SHROUDS

  There have been numerous “true” shrouds of Jesus—along with vials of his mother's breast milk, hay from the manger in which he was born, and countless relics of his crucifixion—but the Turin cloth uniquely bears the apparent imprints of a crucified man. Unfortunately the cloth is incompatible with New Testament accounts of Jesus’ burial.

  John's Gospel (19:38–42, 20:5–7) specifically states that the body was “wound” with “linen clothes” and a large quantity of burial spices (myrrh and aloes). Still another cloth (called “the napkin”) covered his face and head. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin represents a single, draped cloth (laid under and then over the “body”) without any trace of the burial spices.

  Of the many earlier purported shrouds of Christ, which were typically about half the length of the Turin cloth, one was the subject of a reported seventh-century dispute on the island of Iona between Christians and Jews, both of whom claimed it. As adjudicator, an Arab ruler placed the alleged relic in a fire from which it levitated, unscathed, and fell at the feet of the Christians—or so says a pious tale. In medieval Europe alone there were “at least forty-three ‘True Shrouds’” (Humber 1978, 78).

  SCANDAL AT LIREY

  The cloth now known as the Shroud of Turin first appeared about 1355 at a little church in Lirey, in north central France. Its owner, a soldier of fortune named Geoffroy de Charney, claimed it as the authentic shroud of Christ, although he never explained how he acquired such a fabulous possession. According to a later bishop's report, written by Pierre D'Arcis to the Avignon pope, Clement VII, in 1389, the shroud was being used as part of a faith-healing scam:

  The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and the front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Savior Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Savior had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore…. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunning
ly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud.

  D'Arcis continued, speaking of a predecessor who conducted the investigation and uncovered the forger: “Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed” (emphasis added).

  Action had been taken and the cloth hidden away, but now, years later, it had resurfaced. D'Arcis (1389) spoke of “the grievous nature of the scandal, the contempt brought upon the Church and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the danger to souls.”

  As a consequence Clement ordered that, while the cloth could continue being exhibited (it had been displayed on a high platform flanked by torches), during the exhibition it must be loudly announced that “it is not the True Shroud of Our Lord, but a painting or picture made in the semblance or representation of the Shroud” (Humber 1978, 100). Thus the scandal at Lirey ended—for a time.

  FURTHER MISREPRESENTATION

  During the Hundred Years’ War, Margaret de Charney, granddaughter of the Shroud's original owner, gained custody of the cloth, allegedly for safekeeping. But despite many subsequent entreaties she refused to return it, instead even taking it on tour in the areas of present-day France, Belgium, and Switzerland. When there were additional challenges to the Shroud's authenticity, Margaret could only produce documents officially labeling it a “representation.”

  In 1453, at Geneva, Margaret sold the cloth to Duke Louis I of Savoy. Some Shroud proponents like to say Margaret “gave” the cloth to Duke Louis, but it is only fair to point out that in return he “gave” Margaret the sum of two castles. In 1457, after years of broken promises to return the cloth to the canons of Lirey and later to compensate them for its loss, Margaret was excommunicated. She died in 1460.