Abstract
The icon of Christ currently displayed on the altar of the Sancta Sanctorum chapel in the Lateran was one of the most important images of medieval Rome (figure I). This representation of the enthroned Savior had a special status in the cult topography of the city, for it was housed in the private chapcl of the popes and was considered to be of divine origin; according to the Descriptio Lateranensis ecclesiae, written around 1100, the portrait of Christ was ‘miraculously painted on a pancl that was begun by the Evangelist Luke but finished by God himself through the hand of an angel’.1 In essence, the Lateran icon was a representation of the human appearance of Christ as well as a miraculously created and divincly sanctioned image whose manufacture was expressed in its name ‘acheropsita’, corrupted from the Greek term ‘acheiropoieton’, meaning ‘not made by hand’.2
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