The history of the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help
From a Cretan workshop to a church on the Via Merulana in Rome — the documented story of the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, and how it was nearly lost.
22 October 2026 · 3 min read
The icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help is one of the best-known images of Mary in the world. Copies hang in parish churches, schools and homes on every continent. The original is a small painting on wood that has hung above the high altar of a church in Rome for more than 150 years. This is its documented history.
A painting from Crete
The icon is painted in egg tempera with a gold-leaf background on a wooden panel, about 54 by 42 centimetres (21 by 17 inches). It is painted in the Byzantine manner of the Cretan school, which produced many of the finest icons of the late Middle Ages.
When the icon was restored in 1990, carbon-14 testing dated the wood to between 1325 and 1480. Many art historians attribute the painting to the circle of the Cretan painter Andreas Ritzos (1421–1492), though no one can say for certain who painted it.
Three hundred years in St Matthew's
By the end of the fifteenth century the icon was in Rome. On 27 March 1499 it was placed in the church of St Matthew (San Matteo) on the Via Merulana, between the great basilicas of St Mary Major and St John Lateran, and public veneration began. It stayed there for about three hundred years, cared for in later centuries by Augustinian friars, and became known for the many favours people said they had received while praying before it.
Lost in the upheaval of 1798
In 1798 French troops occupied Rome, and the church of St Matthew was demolished. The Augustinians rescued the icon. After a time at the church of Sant'Eusebio it was placed on a side altar in the small Augustinian church of Santa Maria in Posterula. There, for most of the nineteenth century, it was largely forgotten.
Rediscovered and entrusted to the Redemptorists
In the 1850s the Redemptorists, the congregation founded by St Alphonsus Liguori, built a new church on the Via Merulana — on land that included the site of the old St Matthew's. According to Redemptorist accounts, one of them, Father Michael Marchi, had served Mass as a boy at Santa Maria in Posterula and remembered an old friar there speaking of the icon from St Matthew's.
When the Redemptorists learned the icon's history, their Superior General, Father Nicholas Mauron, asked Pope Pius IX for it. On 11 December 1865 the Pope granted the request, directing that the Augustinians be given another suitable picture in its place. Redemptorist tradition remembers him telling the Redemptorists to "make her known throughout the world."
In January 1866 the icon was received from the Augustinians. It was cleaned and restored, and in 1866 it was enshrined above the high altar of the church of St Alphonsus, where it remains today.
Crowned and restored
Pius IX decreed the icon's canonical coronation in 1866, and it was crowned on 23 June 1867. In 1876 he fixed its feast on 27 June.
The icon was cleaned again in 1940. In 1990 the technical department of the Vatican Museums carried out a full restoration to stop fungal damage, using X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet imaging as well as carbon-14 dating. The work showed that earlier retouching had altered some of the faces.
Made known throughout the world
The Redemptorists took the devotion with them wherever they worked. Copies blessed against the original spread through Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and weekly devotions grew up around them — most famously the Perpetual Novena. Our Mother of Perpetual Help is today the patroness of the Redemptorists, of Haiti, of the shrine in Baclaran in the Philippines, and of dioceses including Issele-Uku in Nigeria.