The Shroud Of Turin

[RivkahChaya]

To the sensationalist theory currently being paraded on Channel 5 to the effect that Leonardo Da Vinci manufactured the Turin Shroud.

I have so many reasons I don't know where to begin.

I may very well complain. Or at least turn the channel over.

Leonardo was born in CE 1452, a little more than 100 years after the first well-documented exhibition of the shroud, of which there are existing souvenirs, and the medieval equivalent of advertising flyers-- the de Charny family made a lot of money exhibiting the shroud, both from charging admission, and selling souvenirs. You could begin there.

It's not so much that the shroud had no provenance before the de Charnys showed up with it, but suddenly after that it is everywhere.

And the middle ages were relic-crazy. People were manufacturing relics left and right, not to mention stealing them, or portions of them, from other churches. Few of them were actually sanctioned by the church, but news traveled slowly. Or, the truth did. The news that So-&-So had the bones of St. Peter traveled like a venereal disease. The Church's debunking of it got around like someone in an iron lung.

[RivkahChaya]

BUMP

I've been reading a lot about the shroud in the last few days. I'm reasonably convinced by the carbon dating done in 1988 - I think the arguments against it are relatively weak. I also think the lack of provenance before the 1300's is damning. However there was almost certainly a similar image in Constantinople in 1204, and the shroud may have been a replica of that one or inspired by it.

What I still can't explain, however, is the exact manner by which it was made. The Italian forgery from 2009 comes very close, but here is an article about some differences between it and the shroud:
https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/thibault-lg.pdf

A guy named Joe Nickell has made very convincing replicas of the shroud using only materials available in the 13th century. The only thing about the replicas is that they are fresher and cleaner, which is frankly exactly how it looked on coins stamped with an image of the shroud made as souvenirs to be purchased at the first exhibition of the shroud by Geoffroi de Charny (not the knight Templar), the first owner of record of the shroud, some time in the first half of the 14th century.

The local bishop sent someone to check out this first exhibition, and the person came back, proclaiming the shroud a fraud, claiming to have talked with the artist who made it. It was the position then, and is the position now, of the official Catholic Church, that the shroud is a work of devotional art, and not the real shroud of Jesus.

It doesn't jibe with the descriptions in the bible, and any rate. More importantly, the hair is clearly the hair of an upright, not reclining figure, and there is no image of the top of the head. It's probably a pigment rubbing of a bas relief figure onto a cloth that was damp at the time and molded onto the bas relief. People made paper and cloth relief rubbings all the time then. It was a common hobby in the Middle Ages.

[GUT]

Serves em right.

[Magpie]

Sorry I missed the "not" my bad.

No problem--that many foreskins in one post is gonna be a distraction, no doubt.

[GUT]

Sorry I missed the "not" my bad.

[Magpie]

I believe I expressed some doubt on that one GUT.

Now if they were stitched together into some sort of poncho affair, I might venture a look see.

[GUT]

G'Day Magpie

You'd stand in line to see a foreskin!!!!!!!

[Magpie]

I don't think the Shroud is "real" (i.e. the burial cloth of Christ).

On the other hand I don't believe the 487 extant foreskins of Christ are all "real" either (in the sense of being lopped off the Holy Todger).

However the former is still a fascinating artifact--not sure I'd stand in line to see the latter.

[Damaso Marte]

BUMP

I've been reading a lot about the shroud in the last few days. I'm reasonably convinced by the carbon dating done in 1988 - I think the arguments against it are relatively weak. I also think the lack of provenance before the 1300's is damning. However there was almost certainly a similar image in Constantinople in 1204, and the shroud may have been a replica of that one or inspired by it.

What I still can't explain, however, is the exact manner by which it was made. The Italian forgery from 2009 comes very close, but here is an article about some differences between it and the shroud:

https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/thibault-lg.pdf

[Henry Flower]

That documentary was tabloid piffle. However, it did demonstrate how well a camera obscura can replicate an image such as is found on the shroud - in fact, there have been so many demonstrations of this over the past few years that we can no longer claim that nobody knows how such an image could be created. The camera obscura demonstrations have been very compelling.

The shroud has become a microcosm of the 'God-of-the-gaps' argument. Some people will find it very difficult to let go of the idea that we have no idea how it could have been created. Some people with faith take great pleasure in the notion of scientists being baffled. I do not. And moreover, I believe that if the shroud were genuinely the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, then there must still be an explanation for the image on the shroud that is not beyond man's understanding. I don't believe that a miracle - an intervention by God in the natural laws of the universe - causes flashes of light or radioactive transferences of images. God isn't Harry Potter, whatever else He/She might be.

But there were too many flaws in the programme's logic: we were informed at the outset that the figure was anatomically flawed - that one arm was way too long, and the fingers were also unnaturally long - but by the end of the show we were being told that Leonardo had used a real crucified corpse as the basis for his camera obscura image. Whose corpse would have such bizarrely elongated fingers? E.T.? Similarly, they were very vague about the head. They told us how Leonardo had painstakingly rendered the human figure and face into a set of mathematical and idealised proportions - but then compared the face of his self-portrait with the face of the Mona Lisa - and suggested that it was truly his self portrait because the proportions matched. It was immediately obvious to me that this was baloney: that what Leonardo would do was (a) create a basic face-map using his mathematical idealised proportions, (b) transfer onto it the detailed features of either his own face, or the Mona Lisa - whoever he happened to be drawing at the time. Hence, no surprise that proportions and features broadly match - he uses the same formulae each time. That doesn't mean that the Mona Lisa is in any sense a 'hidden self-portrait.' It means that absolute fidelity is less important to him than mathematical (and therefore mystical) perfection.

And neither does it mean that the face on the shroud is his, or of his design. Again, if it did broadly conform to Leonardo's idealised facial proportions, that might be because those proportions were based on observing and measuring many faces - to arrive at a kind of 'average'. Therefore no great surprise if there were vague agreement between the two. And from what I could see, the agreement between Leonardo's proportions and those on the shroud was extremely vague.

And in any case, they never quite cleared up how that little head got there: did Leonardo draw it on? Did he make a sculpted head? Did he use his own head (sitting in front of his camera obscura for three days until the exposure was complete?) The documentary trailed off into this insulting vagueness and laziness.

But for me the salient points have always been: the head doesn't match the body, the arms are too long and one is even longer, the fingers are too long, the height of the back does not match the height of the front of the body, and the image is entirely undistorted. It's a manufactured image. I also suspect that ageing has been kind to it - perhaps it looked even less convincing a few centuries ago.

[Robert]

Well Leonardo has an alibi. I happen to know he was in England making crop circles at the time.

[Sally]

Especially being left handed. Ah ha! No wonder he was an evil genius...

It only annoys me because it's yet another example of popularist conspiracy theory. Aargh!

At the bottom of this is that somebody has decided that the image on the shroud was made photographically, and given that it's certainly attested by Leonardo's lifetime he's the obvious candidate for it's manufacture, so everything else is positioned to fit the theory.

References to the Shroud before his lifetime are accordingly dismissed as tenuous. Revisionism. Grrr.

Maybe I should just go to the pub and be done with it...

[Robert]

Poor old Leonardo. I bet he banged his thumb too.

[Sally]

So Leonardo faked the Turin shroud and painted himself for the Mona Lisa? Isn't there a simpler explanation for the shroud? Mr Woo was a lousy laundryman.

Just another half-baked conspiracy theory. Allegedly, he was so keen to manufacture this holy relic that he 'crucified' a corpse (justifiable, because he wasn't a Christian in the view of the 'theory')

Twaddly Tosh. Conspiracy-A-Go-Go

Still, as we know, he is responsible for all ancient mysteries of dubious moral content, so doubtless it'll become mainstream.

Lunacy.

[Robert]

So Leonardo faked the Turin shroud and painted himself for the Mona Lisa? Isn't there a simpler explanation for the shroud? Mr Woo was a lousy laundryman.