The Face as Icon

The Christian tradition places the face at the centre of its visible theology. Genesis 1:27 says man is made in the image and likeness of God; the face is the place at which that image is most concentrated in the visible. The icon tradition of the Eastern and Catholic Churches builds its entire theology of the holy image on this premise: the face is the icon, and the icon is the face. This page traces the Christian iconography of the face through its principal images.

The Holy Face of Christ — the iconographic tradition

The Christian tradition holds a small number of images of the face of Christ as acheiropoieta — “not made by hands.” The tradition is that the face of Christ left an impression on certain cloths during His earthly life and Passion, and that these impressions are the source of all subsequent legitimate iconography of His face. The Eastern and Western Churches differ on details but agree on the basic claim: the canonical face of Christ in Christian art is not artistic invention; it is derived from material contact.

The Mandylion of Edessa. The earliest of the acheiropoieta. By tradition, King Abgar V of Edessa wrote to Christ during His earthly ministry asking for healing; Christ pressed His face to a cloth and sent the cloth in reply. The image healed Abgar and converted the city. The Mandylion was preserved at Edessa until the 10th century, when it was translated to Constantinople; it was lost in the sack of 1204 by the Fourth Crusade. Multiple subsequent claims of the original have been made; the most credible historical case connects the Mandylion to the Shroud of Turin.

The Veil of Veronica. The tradition of the woman who wiped Christ’s face on the way to Calvary, receiving the impression of His features on her veil. The name Veronica is a back-formation from vera icon (“true image”). The veil is preserved in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; visible at certain ceremonies, normally enclosed in the reliquary. Other claimed Veronica veils are at Manoppello in Italy and elsewhere.

The Shroud of Turin. The most extensively examined of the Christ-relics. Treated in detail on the Christological Relics page. The frontal image on the Shroud preserves the face the entire Western iconographic tradition has descended from. The face is bearded, long-haired, with a slightly elongated face, prominent brow, deep eye sockets, and a serene expression even in the marks of suffering. The same face is recognisable in Byzantine icons from the 6th century onward, in Western painting from the medieval period to the present, and in the modern devotional imagery the reader has been seeing since childhood.

The Sacred Heart imagery

The Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, formally established by the visions of St Margaret Mary Alacoque (1673–1675), produced a specific iconography in which the face of Christ is shown above His exposed Heart, the Heart crowned with thorns, surmounted by a cross, surrounded by flame. The face in Sacred Heart imagery follows the iconographic tradition of the acheiropoieta — same beard, same hair, same gaze — but with the expression of immediate, present love directed at the viewer.

The Sacred Heart became the dominant Catholic image of Christ in the 19th and 20th centuries; the reader who grew up in a Catholic home likely saw the image in the kitchen or above the bed.

The Marian face

The Marian iconographic tradition is at least as extensive as the Christological. The face of Mary in Christian art descends from a small number of canonical types:

The Hodegetria. The Eastern type in which Mary holds the infant Christ and gestures toward Him. Her face is grave, attentive, slightly tilted toward the child. Tradition attributes the original to the evangelist St Luke as iconographer. The most famous Hodegetria icons are at Constantinople (lost in 1453), Częstochowa (Poland), and Tikhvin (Russia).

The Eleousa (Tenderness). Mary cheek-to-cheek with the infant Christ, the expression tender, the eyes large and looking out at the viewer with the weight of foreknowledge of the Passion. The Vladimir Mother of God (12th century, Constantinople, now Moscow) is the most famous of this type.

The Theotokos Enthroned. Mary seated as Queen, the infant Christ on her lap, both faces frontal. The royal Marian type.

The Western Madonna. The medieval and Renaissance western variations — Giotto, Duccio, Raphael, the entire Sienese and Florentine tradition. The face becomes more individualised, the expression more naturalised, while the iconographic essentials remain.

The Immaculate Conception. Mary alone, standing on the moon, crowned with twelve stars (Revelation 12), serpent under her foot. The expression is exalted but human. Murillo’s versions are the most famous.

The Sorrowful Mother (Mater Dolorosa). The face of grief, often with seven swords piercing the heart. The Pieta is a variation.

Mary Undoer of Knots. The Augsburg painting by Schmidtner (c. 1700), addressed in the site’s Severing the Tie cluster. The face is patient, deliberate, attentive to the work of loosing.

What the iconographic tradition teaches the reader

Three things the reader can take from the long Christian iconography of the face:

I. The face is theologically loaded. The Christian tradition has not treated the face as a surface or as biology alone. The face is the place at which the person is most present, where God’s image is most concentrated, where the soul meets the world. To attend to the face is not vanity; it is participation in a tradition that has held the face sacred for two thousand years.

II. The canonical face is recognisable. Christ’s face is recognisable across two millennia of Christian art because the iconographic tradition preserved it faithfully. Mary’s face is recognisable for the same reason. The reader’s own face, in the older tradition’s reading, is a particular instance of the human face that is itself a particular instance of the divine image — not generic, not interchangeable, but recognisable as the reader’s own. Identity is preserved in the face.

III. The face shows the soul, but slowly. The Christian iconographic tradition was not committed to surface realism; it was committed to the radiance of the form through the matter (Plotinus’s and Aquinas’s claritas). The face the reader has at fifty is the face the reader’s life has produced — what they have loved, what they have prayed, what they have suffered, what they have refused. The face is a slow self-portrait the soul is painting from the inside.

The discipline of the iconographic gaze

The Orthodox and Catholic devotional traditions practice iconographic prayer: sitting before an icon, looking at the face, and letting the face look back. The exchange is held to be real; the reader who has done it knows the difference between staring at a photograph and praying before an icon. The site recommends, as a standing devotion, the keeping of one or two icons in the reader’s home — a face of Christ, a face of Mary — and the brief daily practice of looking at them with attention. The faces teach what they show.

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