The Man of Sorrows – an iconographic type of Jesus Christ following his Crucifixion – has received extensive analytical treatment in the art-historical literature. Following a model that draws scholarly attention to the dynamics of cross-cultural artistic exchange in the central Middle Ages, this article reconsiders recent advances in the scholarly literature and refocusses analysis upon the Man of Sorrows within the context of its ‘shared’ intercultural heritage, suspended between Byzantium and the West, as an image ultimately transformed from liturgical icon to iconographic device.