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Are there any indications from art history that resemble the Shroud?
There are no descriptions of Jesus’ appearance in the New Testament. Nor are there any reputable descriptions in any known early Church sources. St. Augustine of Hippo made a point of this when he wrote his monumental works in the fifth century. Yet, starting in the sixth century a new common appearance for Jesus emerged in eastern art. We see it today in hundreds of icons, paintings, mosaics, and Byzantine coins. This common quality seems to have started in the Middle East about the same time that the Image of Edessa was discovered. Prior to this time, images of Jesus were mostly of a young, beardless man, often with short hair, often in story-like settings in which he was depicted as a shepherd.
Abruptly, throughout the Middle East, and eventually throughout eastern Mediterranean Europe, depictions of Jesus became full frontal portraits with distinctive facial characteristics. Jesus now had shoulder length hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked beard. Numerous other characteristics appeared in these portraits and some of them were seemingly strange and of no particular artistic merit. Many portraits had two wisps of hair that dropped at an angle from a central parting of the hair. Many works showed Jesus with large “owlish” eyes. Paul Vignon, a French scholar, who first categorized these facial attributes in 1930, also described a square cornered U shape between the eyebrows, a downward pointing triangle on the bridge of the nose, a raised right eyebrow, accents on both cheeks with the accent on the right cheek being somewhat lower, an enlarged left nostril, an accent line below the nose, a gap in the beard below the lower lip, and hair on one side of the head that was shorter than on the other side.
Now with modern image analysis technology we can clearly see that the portraits in numerous works of art are most probably sourced from a single image and those pictorial characteristics are those found on the Shroud of Turin.
Some most notable and telling portraits include:
- Christ Pantocrator, an icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (550 CE)
- Byzantine Justinian II solidus, a coin (695)
- Icon of Christ at St. Ambrose, (now in Milan) (700s)
- Christ Enthroned, a mosaic in the narthex of Hagia Sophia Cathedral (850 – 900)
- Christ Pantocrator, a dome mosaic in a church in Daphni (1050 – 1100)
- Christ the Merciful, a mosaic icon now in a Berlin museum (1000s)
- Christ Pantocrator, an apse mosaic in Cefalu Cathedral, Sicily (1148)
The Chrysanthemum image found on the Shroud is particularly significant. What makes this so is not just the prominence and clarity of the image on the Shroud, but the fact that this flower is depicted accurately, as to its likeness and relationship to the face, on some early icons and coins. This includes the Pantocrator icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery and the seventh century Justinian solidus coin.
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© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
