Images of Christ: Of shrouds, handkerchiefs and emeralds…

Rowena Loverance discusses a moving depiction of Christ

by Rowena Loverance 29th September 2017

In her 2017 Reith Lectures historical novelist Hilary Mantel coined a memorable definition. ‘History,’ she said, ‘is what is left in the sieve after the centuries have poured through it.’ I thought of this as I mused on this month’s artwork, which is definitely the oddest of the twelve.

Of all the yearnings to be in direct touch with the historical Jesus – the quest for the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code, even the Glastonbury Thorn – most powerful has been the urge to be certain what Jesus actually looked like. In the first Christian millennium, this gave rise to the cult of the Mandylion of Edessa (modern Urfa, in south-east Turkey), where a miraculous image of Christ, believed to have been created when he pressed a handkerchief to his face, was preserved until the tenth century, when it was forcibly carried off to Constantinople. By the fourteenth century, such images had multiplied in western Europe, with the first record of the Shroud of Turin, believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus, and the cult of Veronica and the miraculous image preserved on her veil, of which countless examples survive today in Italy and Spain.

The English version of this late medieval piety is less well known, but even more exotic. In Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery is a small painted and gilded panel bearing a profile portrait of Christ, and a lengthy inscription, attesting that the image is taken from an engraved emerald given by the Ottoman sultan to pope Innocent VIII. It is known as the Amaryld Vernicle, vernicle being a version of Veronica. The panel was originally held in nearby Whalley Abbey; it is thought to be seventeenth century in date. It is not unique, similar panels appear occasionally on the art market, and sell for modest prices. From the inscription, it is thought that the earliest version may date from the time of Henry VIII; the fact that the image is in profile suggests that it may have originally arrived in England on a medal, an easy pre-modern way of transmitting images.

Sadly, nothing is known of the Emerald Vernicle itself, either in the Vatican or in its supposed earlier existence in the Byzantine and Ottoman treasuries. The purported reason for the gift accords with the murky world of Ottoman inheritance struggles – the pope had imprisoned Bayezid’s brother Cem, and the sultan was hoping to persuade Innocent to keep him safely secured. But whether the emerald ever actually existed is far from clear – the claim made elsewhere (on a tapestry version now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) that it was originally carved for Tiberius, emperor at the time of Jesus’ ministry, is probably the least likely part of the whole improbable story.

So is this tale anything other than a fragment of antiquarianism, unaccountably left in the sieve? The image of Christ, spare and plain on its gold background, is a moving one. It does no harm to be reminded, saturated as we now are with images, of the lengths our ancestors were prepared to go to in order to record and disseminate them. And the image turns up in the most unexpected places – a painting of the Amaryld Vernicle hung for years on the parlour wall of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

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