Lamentation Art

Dan

8 years ago

Please note: Even though one might get the impression that Gertrud Schiller wrote these
words in her book, she did not do so. No one specifically says she did. But in reading
three posting to which links are provided, one could think so. I did. I stand corrected.

Yesterday, Ana Enrico, citing Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. 2, posted these words in the Shroud Guild Facebook page:

11th century ivory – within a hundred years of the arrival of the Edessa Icon Byzantine art suddenly produces Lamentation art forms showing Jesus laid out on a large shroud in a manner resembling the Turin Shroud. Why?

That sounded familiar. I have not seen the book – a used copy can be had for $325 through Amazon – so where had I seen this quoation? Ah, yes, Colin Berry had quoted those words in his blog back in December in a posting entitled, The definitive answer to the Shroud of Turin is plain for all to see in 400 year old paintings. He kindly provided a link to an article, The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History: Part Three: The Shroud of Constantinople, in the Associates for Biblical Research site. There is some good reading there, particularly on this topic starting about 2/5 of the way down the webpage.

I know we have been over this ground before. But I thought the question that Schiller poses – Why? – was particularly interesting.

Here are abstracts and links to the various parts of this series at on the Shroud of Turin at the Associates for Biblical Research:

The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History: Part One: To Edessa

If Biblical Archaeology is defined loosely as “the study of the ancient things related to the Bible,” then surely the sindon, linen used to wrap Jesus’ body in death, has to be of interest. Most informed Christians now know that there is a serious candidate, the Shroud of Turin.

The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History: Part Two: To the Great City

The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History is a four part review of the historical evidence for the Shroud of Turin from the 1st century to the beginning of the 15th. In Part 1 a mysterious picture slowly emerges from antiquity as a cloth on which Jesus supposedly imprints his face and sends to a king in the northern Mesopotamian city of Edessa. But during the 8th through 10th centuries additional evidence suggests that this is a large, folded cloth depicting Christ’s full, bloodied body.

The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History: Part Three: The Shroud of Constantinople

Part 1 of this survey began an admittedly sympathetic summary of Ian Wilson’s theory (updated) that Jesus’ NT burial shroud was quietly preserved from antiquity, but only gradually introduced into Christian traditions as The Holy Image of Edessa. This was a famous cloth on which Jesus supposedly imprinted his face and sent to 1st century King Abgar V in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey.

The Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History: Part 4: To Little Lirey

This final part of the Shroud of Turin’s Earlier History addresses the means by which it left Constantinople in the east (in or not long after 1204) and reappeared about 150 years later in the little village of Lirey, France. The relic’s “good” history is acknowledged by almost all to begin about 1355 when a minor French nobleman with an outstanding reputation, Geoffrey de Charny, is believed to be the cloth’s first certain owner…