Cover Blurb:  Origins of the Turin Shroud: Solving history’s greatest mystery

imageIf by now you are thoroughly bored by the continuing coverage of Charles Freeman’s article, then ignore this. I promise many other topics as well.

The conversation is far from over. So if you are still with me we should take a look at History Today’s blog space. Here we find Charles attempting to defend his ‘it’s a painting’ assertion:

I am not sure why there should be something special physically about the Shroud and why it cannot be a ‘mere painting’. After all ,as my article shows, there is a mass of evidence that suggests it was just this . . .

And Terry Conspiracy putting the kibosh on:

The real issue, is whether the Shroud is a Medieval work of art, or not.

Well published scientific research has confirmed for most of us long ago, that whatever the Shroud is, and regardless of when exactly it was created, the Shroud of Turin is "not" a painting.

There are several highly respected teams of scientists and artists that have both invested and risked large portions of their careers by attempting to explain and/or replicate the process that created the image, and to date, none have even come close to being successful.

That is why it is still such a great mystery to ponder and speculate over.

What you fail to mention (I suspect deliberately) Charles, is that with the exception of the remaining stains of "human blood" that are still on the cloth, the actual image of Christ is virtually invisible to the eye up close, and it only takes on a vague human form at a distance.

All of the amazingly accurate "head to toe" evidence of scourging, the crown of thorns, and all the other chillingly accurate anatomical details of facial features, Crucifixion, and torture, only become visible when viewed in photographic "negative" images of the Shroud.

As much as I appreciate the insight you have given me through your discussion of the changes in the depiction of this icon’s blood in art images over time, I really would like you to explain how you could possibly devote so much time to exploring these fine forensic details in the Shroud’s image, without informing your readers about the unique and precarious precondition of having to wait 500 years for photography to be invented, before anyone, including the artist, could actually see those details.

Did I say kibosh? Not so fast. Charles has a reply:

No, Terry. These details were clear for all to see in the fifteenth ,sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when there were frequent expositions. Perhaps as the images faded, perhaps for other reasons, expositions became fewer and fewer and as the images could no longer be seen by large crowds, restricted to the cathedral and probably relatively few visitors. So in 1898 it had been thirty years since the previous exposition and twenty- six since the one before that (1842) . . . . So it must have been a real shock when the Shroud came out of storage and by this time it had the total faded images recorded by Secondo Pia.

Deliberately?  Or out of a lack of comprehension?  I suspect that Charles doesn’t understand what a photographic negative is (see Dear Charles Freeman, re the Famous Arnolfini Portrait by Van Eyck and his comments therein).