The Icons of Christ

The icon of Christ stands at the theological center of the whole tradition, for it is His depictability, grounded in the Incarnation, that makes every other icon possible. This file treats the great types of the image of Christ — the Pantocrator, the “Not-Made-by-Hands” (the Mandylion / Image of Edessa) with its disputed tradition, and the Deesis — and the settled iconographic vocabulary by which Christ is shown.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Theology of Depicting Christ

Because Christ is “the image of the invisible God” made visible in the flesh (Colossians 1:15; John 1:14), His icon is not merely permitted but is the ground of the whole iconographic tradition: the icons of the Theotokos and the saints follow from the depictability of the incarnate Lord (see The Image of God and the Incarnation and Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument). The icon depicts the one Person of the Word in His visible human features and never the divine nature as such; hence the settled conventions that mark every icon of Christ. His halo alone bears the cross (the cruciform nimbus), inscribed in the Greek tradition with the letters Ὁ ὬΝ, “the One Who Is” — the divine Name revealed to Moses (Exodus 3:14) — confessing that this depicted man is the eternal God (Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982; Egon Sendler, The Icon: Image of the Invisible, Oakwood, 1988). The icon is captioned with the abbreviation ΙϹ ΧϹ (Iesous Christos), the name that fixes the identity of the prototype (see Image and Prototype). His garments follow a settled scheme — a red or wine tunic and a blue-green mantle, signifying (in the traditional reading) the divine nature clothed in the human, or humanity taken up into divinity (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982).

The Pantocrator

The most fundamental type is Christ Pantocrator — “Ruler of All,” “Almighty.” The Pantocrator shows Christ, usually to the waist or enthroned, blessing with His right hand and holding the Gospel book (open or closed) in His left; the face is grave, majestic, and merciful at once, and the whole image confesses Christ as Lord, Judge, and Savior (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982; Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art, Oxford, 2000). The Pantocrator is the icon traditionally placed in the central dome of an Orthodox church, from which Christ presides over the whole assembly, and it stands as the principal icon of Christ on the iconostasis, to the right of the royal doors (see Veneration, the Iconostasis, and the Icon Corner). Among the most famous surviving examples is the sixth-century encaustic Pantocrator of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, which — because Sinai lay under Muslim rule and so escaped the iconoclasts’ destruction — is one of the very oldest icons to survive and a witness to the pre-iconoclastic image of Christ (Kurt Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, Princeton, 1976; Cormack, Byzantine Art, 2000).

The Not-Made-by-Hands: The Mandylion / Image of Edessa

A distinct and theologically weighty type is the Acheiropoietos — the image of Christ’s face “not made by [human] hands,” the Mandylion or Image of Edessa. This is a bust-length image of the Holy Face alone, traditionally on a cloth, and it holds a special place because the tradition claims for it a miraculous, non-painted origin, making it in effect the archetype of all icons of Christ and a standing proof, in the iconophile argument, that Christ Himself sanctioned His own image (John of Damascus cites the Edessa image among the ancient testimonies to icons: Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.33; and see John of Damascus and the Defense).

The tradition, in its developed form, holds that King Abgar of Edessa, sick, sent to Christ asking Him to come; Christ pressed a cloth to His face, leaving the imprint of His features, and sent it to Abgar, who was healed. The image, lost and rediscovered walled up in the city, became Edessa’s great palladium, and was solemnly translated to Constantinople in 944 (Averil Cameron, “The History of the Image of Edessa: The Telling of a Story,” in Okeanos: Essays Presented to Ihor Ševčenko, 1983; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, Chicago, 1994).

[Disputed / Apocryphal: the historicity of the Abgar legend and of the miraculous origin of the Image of Edessa. The correspondence of Abgar and Christ appears already in Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History I.13), but without any mention of an image; the image is added to the story only later, the developed “not-made-by-hands imprint” form crystallizing by the sixth century and receiving its fullest statement in the tenth-century Narratio de imagine Edessena associated with the court of Constantine VII (Cameron, “The History of the Image of Edessa,” 1983; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 1994). Modern scholarship treats the miraculous-imprint origin as legendary and the image’s early history as the growth of a tradition, not as documented fact; the further identification of the Mandylion with the Shroud of Turin is a modern hypothesis rejected by most scholars. This collection reports the Mandylion as a venerable tradition of the Holy Face, pinned to its attestation (Eusebius for the letters, sixth–tenth centuries for the image), and does not assert its miraculous origin as historical fact (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

Whatever its origin, the Acheiropoietos type — the Holy Face, often shown on a cloth held by angels (the “Holy Napkin,” Ubrus / Mandylion in the Slavic tradition) — became a beloved and widely reproduced icon of Christ, and its feast (the Translation of the Image of Edessa, 16 August) is kept in the Byzantine calendar (Belting, Likeness and Presence, 1994; the Western parallel is the Veronica tradition).

The Deesis

A third major arrangement is the Deesis (Greek deesis, “supplication,” “intercession”): Christ enthroned or in majesty at the center, with the Theotokos on His right and St. John the Forerunner on His left, both turned toward Him in postures of intercession, hands raised in entreaty on behalf of humanity (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1982). The Deesis expresses the theology of intercession and of the Last Judgment: Christ the Judge, flanked by the two greatest intercessors — His Mother and the greatest of those born of women (Matthew 11:11) — pleading for mercy on the world. The Deesis forms the theological heart of the classic Russian high iconostasis, where an extended Deesis tier ranges the Theotokos, the Forerunner, the archangels, the apostles, and the great saints on either side of the enthroned Christ, the whole Church turned in intercession toward its Lord (Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, SVS Press, 1992, vol. 2, on the iconostasis; the celebrated Deesis of the Zvenigorod range and the Vladimir Deesis are attributed to the circle of St. Andrei Rublev). In this the icons of Christ open directly onto the icons of the Theotokos and the saints, who stand around Him as the members of His Body — the subject of the next file.

References

Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982. (The types of the icon of Christ; the Pantocrator, the Holy Face, the Deesis; the iconographic conventions.)
Ouspensky, Leonid. Theology of the Icon. 2 vols. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992. (The iconostasis and the Deesis tier.)
John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.33. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 2003. (The Edessa image among the ancient testimonies.)
Cameron, Averil. “The History of the Image of Edessa: The Telling of a Story.” In Okeanos: Essays Presented to Ihor Ševčenko, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7 (1983): 80–94. (The growth of the Abgar/image legend.)
Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. (The Mandylion; the acheiropoietos tradition; the translation of 944.)
Weitzmann, Kurt. The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Icons, Vol. 1: From the Sixth to the Tenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. (The Sinai Pantocrator.)
Cormack, Robin. Byzantine Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History I.13 (the Abgar correspondence, without an image). Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Scripture: Colossians 1:15; John 1:14; Exodus 3:14; Matthew 11:11.