The Image Not Made by Hands (Mandylion)

The cloth on which, by the tradition, Christ left the imprint of His own face and sent it to Abgar the king of Edessa, who was sick. It is the icon the iconodules reached for first in the quarrel over images, because it is an image of Christ that no painter made and that Christ Himself gave, so the argument that an image of God is presumption has to answer it. The cloth was brought from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 and the Church keeps that day. In painting it is always the face alone on a cloth, frontal, with no body, and it is the image traditionally set over the doors of a church or above the royal doors. Feast: August 16.