The Shroud Of Turin

[belinda]

Blessed are the Cheesemakers.

Graham

Blessed are they indeed but I think it's a bit unfair that only the Greek shall inherit the Earth

[Sally]

I object

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.

[Robert]

The Shroud dates from c. 2000 years ago - Hawkwind's fingerprints have been found on it.

[Sally]

Ah. That makes much more sense!

[DVV]

The Shroud dates from c. 2000 years ago -

True. Whenever it was made, now it dates from c.2000 years ago.

[Sally]

However..

I did learn that Da Vinci posed in his own portrait of the Mona Lisa - yes, it was him all the time, the devilish trickster.

Hmm...

If he can do that, he can do anything, right?

I blame the Knight's Templars' shopping list for this.

[DVV]

I did learn that Da Vinci posed in his own portrait of the Mona Lisa - yes, it was him all the time, the devilish trickster.

L'introspection, aaarfff, cette couillonnerie moderne...................

[Sally]

The Evil Geniius of Artists...

Makes me want to hurt somebody, preferably the 'scholars' who peddle this sensationalist piffle in the first place.

The way things are, I'd be very surprised if Da Vinci wasn't Jack in a Time Machine (possibly posing as Van Gogh)

That's it, case solved.

[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.

[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]

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

[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]

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

[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.

[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