Images & Paintings

Some images are claimed to have appeared without a painter — acheiropoieta, “not made by hands.” The tilma. The Shroud. A Host that shows a face. This section is those objects, photographed as they are. If a case has a tilma, you will see the tilma. If it has a shroud, the shroud.

The file

How this section is read

Christianity is a religion of a face. The Gospels end with people looking at a man they had seen die. Later centuries kept looking. Some of the looking produced art: icons, altarpieces, a copy of a copy. Some of it produced a rarer claim — that an image had appeared without a human hand, or that a hand had been used so strangely that the result still has no agreed workshop method. The Greek word is acheiropoieton. The Shroud of Turin. The tilma of Guadalupe. The Mandylion. Manoppello. A Host at Vilakkannur with a face in the bread.

A documentary camera loves these objects because they can be lit, magnified, dated, and argued over. The 1978 STURP team spent days on the Shroud with tape and spectrometers. Photographers have gone into the eyes of the Guadalupe tilma looking for reflections the size of a pin. Carbon-14 has given the Shroud a medieval date that a large Catholic public does not accept. None of that is the same as the Resurrection. It is the after-echo: a piece of cloth that will not sit quietly in a museum label.

This section shows the official picture of each object when that picture is the relic itself: the cloth, the tilma, the icon. A church that merely houses the object is not put in its place.

9 signs

Colombia

1 sign, in the order of their years

ImageChurch-approved

Our Lady of Chiquinquirá

Chiquinquirá, BoyacáPainting renewed 26 December 1586

A painting of Our Lady, ruined by damp in a poor chapel, is said to have cleared and shone on 26 December 1586 while a woman prayed. Colombia’s national shrine stands on that hour. The renewal is a local tradition the Church has crowned, not a laboratory of pigment.

Italy

4 signs, in the order of their years

ImageLong veneration

The Volto Santo of Lucca

LuccaIn Lucca by the 8th century

A monumental wooden crucifix with a clothed, living Christ, said to have been carved by Nicodemus and to have arrived by riderless ship. For medieval Europe, this was the Holy Face.

ImageOpen / under study

The Shroud of Turin

Turin (earlier Lirey, Chambéry)First documented 1354; claimed as 1st century

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man. Many Catholics believe it may be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. The Church has not formally declared it authentic.

6 studied signs on this image

ImageLong veneration

Our Lady of Perpetual Help

Church of St. Alphonsus, RomeCretan icon, 15th c.; in Rome from 1499

A Cretan icon of Mother and Child, the Child’s sandal falling as he sees the instruments of the Passion. Entrusted by Pius IX to the Redemptorists to be made known everywhere.

ImageOpen / under study

The Holy Face of Manoppello

Manoppello, AbruzzoDocumented in Manoppello from 1506; claimed older

A translucent cloth in a Capuchin church, visible from both sides, bearing a living face that some identify with the Veil of Veronica or the burial face-cloth (sudarium). Benedict XVI visited it in 2006. No decree of authenticity.

Peru

1 sign, in the order of their years

ImageLong veneration

The Lord of Miracles

LimaPainted c. 1651; wonders from 1655

An Angolan slave paints Christ crucified on a wall in Lima’s Pachacamilla. Earthquakes level the district; the wall stands. A city in purple processes behind the image every October.

Poland

1 sign, in the order of their years

ImageLong veneration

Our Lady of Częstochowa

CzęstochowaAt Jasna Góra from 1382; tradition much older

A darkened icon of Mother and Child, slashed on the cheek, which Poland credits with the defense of the monastery in 1655 and with the nation’s soul. Not “not made by hands,” but treated as a wonder-working presence.

Poland / Lithuania

1 sign, in the order of their years

ImageChurch-approved

The Divine Mercy Image

Płock, then Vilnius1931 (vision) · 1934 (first painting)

Jesus appears to St. Faustina Kowalska and asks for an image: one hand raised in blessing, the other touching the heart, two rays — pale and red — and the signature “Jesus, I trust in You.” The devotion was once suppressed, then became a universal feast.

Turkey

1 sign, in the order of their years

ImageLong veneration

The Mandylion of Edessa

Edessa (Şanlıurfa), then ConstantinopleReported in Edessa by 544; tradition of King Abgar

The prototype of every “image not made by hands”: Christ’s face on a cloth, sent to King Abgar of Edessa. The original disappears in the sack of 1204. The idea of it built the Christian icon.