Holy Face of the convent of Montreuil-sous-Laon. Printed on silk. Unrrecorded.

[Holy Face] / [Cistercian nuns] / [Printing on fabric]. La Sainte Face de Montreuil sous Laon ou il ce fait Plusieurs Miracles. S.l.: “P. D.” or P. V.,” s.a. [late 17th or early 18th century]. [24.0 x 14.4 cm], [1] f. woodcut on silk, with letterpress text, mounted on card, with applied border of gilded paper. Abrasions, staining, toning, a few small losses, with minor edge wear, remnants of mounting on verso.
 
 
Unrecorded devotional woodcut—printed on silk and with a border of gilded paper—depicting the Holy Face of Montreuil-sous-Laon, an icon of Christ’s ‘true likeness’ long guarded by Cistercian nuns. Below the Holy Face is a French prayer printed in letterpress.
 
In 1249 a painting of the Holy Face of Christ was sent from Rome by Jacques Pantaleón to his sister Sybille, Abbess of the convent of Montreuil-en-Thiérache (L’abbaye de Montreuil-les-Dames). It was considered to be of extreme antiquity. The icon remained at Montreuil-en-Thiérache until 1636, when unrest forced the nuns into a peripatetic existence before they settled in the 1650s in the former leper colony of Saint Ladre, near Laon. They transferred the name ‘Montreuil’ there and called the new convent ‘Montreuil-sous-Laon.’
 
The Holy Face icon was with the nuns at Montreuil-sous-Laon until the Revolution, when the picture, after a few years of wandering, landed in 1795 in Laon Cathedral, where it remains today.
 
Our woodcut uses the appellation ‘Montreuil sous Laon,’ so this item dates from after 1650 and before the Revolution, and the style would seem to place it in the late 17th century or early 18th century. It was likely produced for distribution to pilgrims visiting the icon.
 
 
OCLC and KVK do not locate further copies of this print, nor have I seen it in the literature devoted to the Holy Face of Laon.
 
*Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Deux témoignages sur la Sainte Face de Laon au XIIIe siècle?,” Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, vol. 86, no. 2 (2008), pp. 273-85; André Grabar, La Sainte Face de Laon: Le Mandylion dans l’art orthodoxe; L’abbé A. Lecomte, La Sainte-Face de la cathédrale de Laon.