Do-it-yourself Shroud of Turin

How do you place a negative image on linen without pigments? Simple: you sun-bleach the linen through a stencil painted on glass. Read about it at Discovery News. The experimenter, Nathan Wilson, also has some quite reasonable words about not reading too much into an early carbon-14 dating, in the event that the 1988 tests were indeed of samples taken from later patches:

It is extraordinarily unlikely that a forger would use a cloth fresh off the loom. If I was some villainous Crusader, hoping to fake the burial shroud of Christ, the first thing I would do is obtain a burial cloth. And the best place to get one, as well as the cheapest, is from a tomb.

UPDATE: Now that I can squeeze out a bit of time, here are a few thoughts prompted by a closer reading of Wilson's original article and by reader Tom Veal's own post on the subject.

Wilson appears to have asked various specialists for advice, but should have asked a few more -- in particular, historians and art historians. Veal points out the unlikeliness of a medieval forger having large sheets of plate glass to work with. Yet the same effect could have been obtained by use of other translucent supports, such as thin sheets of stretched linen, cotton, or silk. Full transparency would not be necessary – merely the ability to cast a shadow.

Veal asks another good question when he wonders why a forger using Wilson's methods would bother bleaching out the back side after finishing the front. I can come up with two plausible explanations. The first would be if thick linen were used, thick enough that the sun-bleaching would not carry through to the back. In that case, after finishing the front, its background color would no longer match that of the back. That might look a bit odd and even suspicious – the sort of telltale sign that a canny forger would do his best not to leave behind. So he flips the workpiece over to sun-bleach the back to match, but after a day or two in the blazing Mediterranean sun realizes that this might also bleach out the shadowy figure on the front. What to do? Reuse the painted linen negative to keep the shadows shadowed. Alignment wouldn't be a problem, assuming the original exposure was done with both the stencil-bearing fabric and the workpiece mounted on a common stretcher (if the design wasn't exactly centered, just flip over both pieces).

For thin fabric, with the image going all the way through, there wouldn't be much reason to bleach out the back. But if the side we now regard as the back had originally been seen as the front, and if at some point that side had been exposed to light for an extended period, that might explain what we see today.

What, then, about Fanti and Maggiolo's arguments that the Shroud's image of Christ's front is doubly superficial (i.e., thinly laid atop both sides of the linen, with nothing in between)? After looking at the actual article, I'm not so certain if this has been conclusively demonstrated, at least there (reference, rather, is made to other statements in other articles). Yet if this is indeed true, that would only contradict Wilson's hypothesis if the linen used was originally darkened all the way through. If one started with linen that was only superficially darkened (as might occur through oxidization – it would be worth checking on the exact mechanics of the darkening of ancient textiles), the results of sun-bleaching would appear to be equally superficial.

It also bears noting that while this may have taken some ingenuity, the forgers involved were aiming high. While Veal remarks

That is a lot of trouble and expense to undertake in an era when very crude productions were sufficient to fool the credulous.

I would not overestimate the credulity of those at the top end of medieval society, who didn’t get and stay there by want of suspicion. Paint up a shroud or sudarium (and note that multiples were recorded) and you might well expect to have the princely would-be purchaser ask his court artists to take a look to see how it might have been done. When the holiest of images were acheiropoietos (not made by human hands), what could be more convincing than to create an image which gave no sign of how it had come to be?

That said, there are some peculiarities of the Shroud that remain difficult to explain away. The nail holes in the wrists are completely at odds with the entire iconographic history of the Crucifixion, and Wilson’s fantasies of murderous Templars experimenting by nailing up innocent Jews are both bizarre and utterly illogical. If the potential buyers of your forged relic all expect nail holes in the palms, you give them nail holes in the palms – even if by some twist you happen to know better. What 14th-century forger would have done otherwise? Which leads me to think that a good argument can be made that if the Shroud was manmade, it was made when the mechanics of Roman crucifixion were still a living memory. How late might this have been? Easily the 5th or 6th century, perhaps 7th or 8th. While depictions of the cross appear in Christian imagery early, the Crucifixion was another matter. I’ll have to double-check, but from what I recall the Crucifixion only begins to be represented with any frequency around the 7th century or later (though thanks to Iconoclasm we don’t have much surviving in the East, which would be where the Shroud would have originated following this line of reasoning).

ADDENDUM: Wilson (unnecessarily, in my opinion) defends the plausibility of access to large sheets of glass here.

Posted by David on March 5, 2005 4:24 PM