Laon Cathedral | The icon of the Holy Face

This icon, painted on wood, represents the face of Christ. It belongs to the family of religious images considered to be ‘not made by the hand of man’, which were particularly venerated in the Middle Ages. It is thought to date from the second half of the twelfth or early thirteenth century.

In 1249, a canon of the cathedral, Jacques de Troyes, the future Pope Urban IV, sent it from Rome to his sister, who was then Mother Superior of the Cistercian abbey of Montreuil-en-Thiérache, not far from Laon. Since 1795, the icon has been kept in the cathedral treasury.
Restored in 1990, it has been on display since 1992 in the Saint-Paul chapel, behind a humidity-stabilised, airtight display case.