Epitaphios
The Flower Images and the Icon
There is another aspect to this icon that is fascinating and perhaps more convincing, the appearance petal-shaped flowers on the shroud. The St. Catherine Christ Pantocrator icon also has distinctive flower images in precisely the same relative positions. If the Shroud was the facial source for this icon as it seems to have been, then it is highly probable that the flower motif was also picked up from the shroud.
As we have noted, it is important to remember that the flower images on the Shroud of Turin may not be actual flower images. But for this argument that question is immaterial. If there are images that look like flowers, even if they are coincidental anomalies caused by background noise or weave irregularities, and they are in the same relative place as there are on the Pantocrator icon, then it does strengthen the argument that the icon was sourced from shroud.
We find this flower motif repeated elsewhere and frequently in pictures of Jesus from this time forward. We find it, commonly, in Byzantine epitaphioi a cloth with a full-length image of Jesus, frequently in burial repose used in Greek Orthodox liturgies for Good Friday.
Man of Sorrows
At about this time, or certainly within a century, a new genre of icons developed: the Man of Sorrows. Jesus is shown often with a bloody side wound, often with his hands folded, often with his head tilted to one side. He was shown rising from a coffin, an ossuary, a reliquary, a box. His face was sad, not victorious.
The imagery is a stark departure from the Pantocrator—Christ the King—icons and mosaics so prevalent in the Byzantine world and beyond. The imagery is a stark departure from the sublime, victorious portrayals of the risen Christ in the gospels. Art historians tell us, haltingly, that the Man of Sorrows may have it origins in another Byzantine art form, the Epitaphios, a large cloth with a full length image of Jesus, most usually in burial repose that is used today in Eastern Orthodox churches with roots in the Byzantine rites for Good Friday. Perhaps. But the Epitaphios, which in Greek mean lamentations on the grave, might have been inspired by the Image of Edessa. And was the iconographic genre of the Man of Sorrows perhaps not a remembrance of a mechanical, ritual raising of Jesus’ shroud, when “on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright, so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.” A remembrance after, as Robert de Clari stated, “none knows - neither Greek nor Frank - what became of that shroud when the city was taken.”
St. Panteleimon Fresco
While Manuel was emperor the church in the St. Panteleimon monastery was built and a grand fresco was painted in 1164. The fresco, like many others of the era, showed Jesus after the crucifixion but before entombment. What catches our attention is the burial shroud with a crisscross pattern of diagonal lines or Xs on the burial cloth. Scavone notes:
As early as 1164 a threnos mural was painted and a liturgical epitaphios was woven in Nerezi, Serbia, both which showed the body of Jesus lying upon a symbolic burial sheet. The mural, however, is important as it shows a shroud designed with a series of Xs very much like the Xs that decorate several artists' copies of the Mandylion that begin to appear in the 10th century . . . It is not precisely a herring-bone weave, but does hint at it. Another interpretation of the Xs, of course, is that they represent Chi, the first Greek character in the name Xpistos. It seems that this X design was common in the Kosovo (Eastern European) region since the Edessa cloth was depicted in a mural at Studenica in 1235 with precisely the same design. (30)
Dan Scavone goes on to say:
Hans Belting is one of the few who have perceived the Shroud as at least one factor among many in the rise of the larger cloth epitaphioi and the new mural art, but sadly he did not follow it up as we might have wished. Belting noticed what he called a new empathetic realism in liturgical representation during the 11th-12th c. (30)
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