Italian art historian Luciano Buso has a new and unique theory about the Shroud of Turin, the controversial 14-foot-long cloth in which some people believe Jesus Christ was buried. Rather than dismissing the battered linen relic—which may rank among the world’s most studied artifacts—as a fraud, he has suggested in recent interviews and a book that an authentic version did indeed exist at some point in history. By the early 1300s, however, it had disintegrated so much that the Catholic Church asked the famous Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone to create a precise replica, according to Buso’s hypothesis. The original, meanwhile, either crumbled into nothingness or was lost or burned.
It is somewhat amazing to see another ‘it-was-painted’ theory emerge after it has been shown, so many times and so clearly, in peer-reviewed scientific journals and other reputable sources, that it is not and cannot be a painted fake relic.
Here is one version of the story: Shroud of Turin: The Work of a Renaissance Artist?
*Thanks to all of you who sent emails and comments. I’m doing well. The surgery, a total hip replacement, was last Friday at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. I was home by Monday walking with a cane but mostly nodding off from medications while trying to write or read.