A guest posting in PDF form by O.K. It begins:
In one of the recent posts on shroudstory.com1 Joe Marino published several interesting excerpts from Carlos Evaristo book The Untold Story of the Holy Shroud. The book claims to contain unpublished information from the Savoy family archives. The most interesting quote goes as follow:
“Another fact confirmed by His Majesty [King Umberto II] was that it was traditionally affirmed, that at one point in the past, he edges of the Lenzuoli (Sheet) had become so tattered as to cause embarrassment or criticism of the Custodians, and those areas were repaired and rewoven using identical techniques, but obviously with similar, yet newer, materials containing dyes and other medieval manufacturing ingredients, in an attempt to better blend the new sections in, as best possible, with the original fabric.”
What’s fascinating is that in the alleged quote, king Umberto speaks of the plural edges, suggesting there were more than just a single repair. If genuine, this could be extremely intriguing, because it may be related to what I considered as one of the weaker points in Benford & Marino argumentation –the spectral quad mosaic.
Read the PFD file. CLICK HERE or click the page image above. A PDF file affords larger images and the ability to print this with logical pagination. Return here to comment if you wish.
What an excellent paper. I commend OK for his thoroughness. Although even Durante’s photos are not immune from lighting artifacts (see http://i.imgur.com/TgVMhjg.png), Shroud 2.0 shows that the corners are indeed darker than their surroundings. I don’t think we can interpret this as reweaving however. Common sense, as well as OK’s photo, suggests that there would be more reweaving the closer to the corner, fading to “pure shroud” at some distance from it. It is remarkable therefore that the C14 results show exactly the opposite, with the Oxford sample, closest to the corner, appearing the oldest and least contaminated, and the Arizona sample, furthest from the corner, the youngest and most contaminated. That’s interesting.
Hugh, We don’t know the pattern of damage for which the reweaving was done to fix. I know it makes sense that the closer to the corner the more damage but this is just an assumption. We can’t tell if the inside suffered more.
Hugh: I will discuss all those issues later, in more papers when I have more time. The controversies surrounding C-14 datings are in fact much more complex than most people think, but I’ll explain the matter later.
I agree with Hugh, an excellent paper, OK. bravo !!
The quad mosaic question is complex.
First, I would like to correct Mrs Flury-Lemberg: ” The late Raymond Rogers examined the surrounding areas where the sample had been taken, by means of infrared pictures of the shroud. The pictures show discolorations in these areas. This has been the inducement for the hypothesis of the mending in medieval times.[…] Rogers attributed the colour change of the one area of the shroud to medieval repairs to which he was unable to give further indications”.
I respect Mrs Flury-lemberg but obviously she did not understand Rogers at all.
Infrared pictures ? No. UV-Vis pictures. Very different.
“This has been the inducement for the hypothesis of the mending in medieval times”
No. Rogers first looked at his Raes threads (and later C14 threads). For Rogers, the UV-Vis pictures were only additional evidence.
In my opinion, there is little doubt that the C14 corner is anomalous also with regard to the quad mosaic pictures.
More later…
I agree with Hugh and Thibault that this is a very fine paper. I look forward to additional writings by O.K. on this as well as from Thibault. I think it’s certainly possible that the other corner was rewoven as well. Two good sources pertaining to the question are “Some Details About the STURP Quad Mosaic Images” at http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/quad.pdf and “Digital image processing techniques demonstrating the anomalous nature of the radiocarbon dating sample area of the Shroud of Turin” at http://www.academicjournals.org/article/article1380798975_Morgan.pdf. One of the topics to be discussed at the St. Louis Shroud conference is Future Testing of the Shroud by Prof. Bruno Barberis. If testing is allowed, the whole question of reweaving and possible locations definitely need to be looked at more closely.
When I attended Valencia Shroud Conference two years ago Professor Bruno Barberis has done a lecture with a similar title.
When he was asked when new tests would be done he answered that he hoped the Pope would grant permission in a near future, but two years have run since and nothing new. emerged.
I sincerely hope his presentation will bring anything new because the list of new non destructive tests he suggested was impressive.
May be as he has privileged relations with Shroud custodians he presents some interesting data from studied Shroud material removed in 2002 restoration.that would be great.
regards
Antero de Frias Moreira
(Centro Português de Sindonologia)