ABSTRACT
The advent of photography within everyone’s reach has led the image to be a fundamental expression of our thinking, but in the Byzantine era, it was probably different. The images were far rarer and people’s way of observing and reasoning was based on something else; consequently, the features of an image were probably not so important to the observer. Some obvious exceptions appear instead for the peculiar face of Christ that is sometimes very similar to that of the Shroud. Perhaps this was the case because the engravers, who had to carry out the task of copying the face of God, were very impressed when they observed the very particular image of the face of Christ on the Shroud. The chapter reports on the numismatic iconography of Christ in chronological order from the first coinage to the fall of Constantinople in 1204 with a brief reference to the subsequent coinage.
