Appropriating Divinity: Iconography, Functionality, and Authority in Latium Acheropita Copies, Ca. Twelfth–Fourteenth Centuries

Abstract

Simultaneously an icon of the enthroned Savior and a secondary relic of the Evangelist Luke, the Acheropita was documented as early as the mid-eighth century, and invested with meaning through its context of viewership. It maintained a layered historicity that extended its reach beyond the blurred boundaries of the Lateran’s Sancta Sanctorum via its Latium copies. Through formalism, iconography, display modes, liturgical functions, and civic performativity—elements of which were occasionally depicted across media—the mimeses of these idiosyncratic surrogates were vindicated and efficacious. Focusing predominantly on evidence from Tivoli, Trevignano, Sutri, and Viterbo, this research further contends that these late medieval panel copies configured time in a non-linear manner, thereby surmounting spatial and temporal borders to facilitate praesentia of Christ and, implicitly, of Rome.