What is that on Luigi Garlaschelli’s left shoulder?

imageA reader writes from the “front porch of my old Kentucky home:”

In reading through some of the newly published material on the STuRP (sic*) site, I found the paper by Paolo Di Lazzaro interesting for its introduction. We read on the first page, “none of techniques tested can simultaneously reproduce its main features, from the 3-D property to the coloration depth, to the resolution of the spatial details. The conclusion was that the image on the Shroud of Turin is not the result of the work of an artist or forger.”

Time, however, did not stand still. The latest testing was by Professor Luigi Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia. According to Reuters, Garlaschelli, claimed that he and his team “have shown it is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud.”

You would think that would be mentioned in the paper.

Well, no.  The examples were fine for the purpose of the paper. And Garlaschelli didn’t come all that close, anyway.  But maybe his method came closer than many of the methods mentioned by Jackson, Jumper and Ercoline and listed by Paolo; for that is who and what Paolo is talking about in his paper.

Maybe Colin Berry should be mentioned as well.  Scroll down a few postings to Colin Berry’s Long Running Investigation of the Shroud. You can also click on the picture of coloration by Colin to access Colin’s blog. Compare that to the coloration photograph in Paolo’s paper.

image

For the record, here is a relevant extract from Paolo’s Shroud-like coloration of linen by ultraviolet radiation:

In 1984, two organizers of the STuRP (Shroud of Turin Research Project), Jackson and Jumper, along with Ercoline published a paper entitled "Correlation of image intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D structure of a human body shape" [1]. In this long paper (26 pages!) that I consider one of the most important works published by STuRP members, the authors describe in meticulous detail the creation of a gallery of images on linen fabrics using all the techniques potentially able to create a Shroud-like image. Note that this paper was published four years before the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, and the authors, unaware that the cloth was woven in the Middle Ages, tested all the possible techniques, ancient and modern, not only those potentially available to the alleged medieval forger.

A list of techniques tested in this article include:

o Direct contact (a statue and a person coloured by inks, or chemicals, or powders, then draped by a linen cloth);

o Thermal colouration (bas reliefs heated in a furnace and placed in contact on both dry and wet linen); o Visible light (faces covered with phosphorescent paints imaged on contoured sheets of a photographic film);

o Electrostatic field; o Vapourgraphy (ammonia vapours on plaster face diffused on linen);

o Artists (professional artists, certified forensic with documented experience in realistic monotone imagery shade a Shroud-like face on linen, first free hand, then with anchor points);

o Hybrid mechanisms (different combinations of two or more techniques among those mentioned).

Jackson, Jumper and Ercoline compared the results of the above attempts with the macroscopic and microscopic features of the Shroud image, and argued that none of techniques tested can simultaneously reproduce its main features, from the 3-D property to the coloration depth, to the resolution of the spatial details. The conclusion was that the image on the Shroud of Turin is not the result of the work of an artist or forger.

* That would be the STERA site, more commonly known as shroud.com.