Shroud of Turin Blog

a racing certainty that the TS was assumed to be a sweat imprint,
and that few if any in the era would have entertained ideas of miraculous
flashed of light, especially as the image is supposed to have had been covered
with blood stains of one kind or another from head to foot. – Colin Berry

Colin, is developing a response to Thibault Heimburger over in the comments section of his blog where is feels better insulated from the acerbic comments of anoxie. Anoxie is not a troll, as Colin says.  He is more like a camp follower who goes about heckling politicians by yelling out annoying questions and comments whenever the politician stops to speak. Politicians learn to insulate themselves, not by moving to venues with guarded doorways where they can, like Stephen Jones, carefully exclude annoying and perhaps dissenting comments but by ignoring them.

Too bad. But to be honest, this blog is not exempt. Four people are completely blocked from commenting. Three of them are beyond being reasonable or being able to comprehend why they should be blocked. You would agree with my decision. One other person has been completely blocked after several lengthy email attempts by me to get him to control his frequent bursts of anger resulting in unjustifiable insults. Unfortunately, this last person, was a significant contributor to this blog even though I seldom agreed with him.

Again, this is too bad. Colin’s comments are important. So if you want to see what Colin is writing in response to Thibault, and you should, you will need to go here. Here is a tempting tidbit:

Well,we seem to be agreed on one thing, namely that the first people to lay eyes on the Shroud would have known what it represented, given the double image, but would have wanted to known how it was formed. If as I believe the image was always faint, our early viewer would have seen it as an imprint left by the body that was once inside the shroud. The view that it was an imprint, not a painting, would have been immediately reinforced by noting that the image is a negative, comparable to a brass rubbing.

In the absence of any documentary evidence to the contrary, and noting the words of St.Francis de Sales that the TS was the repository of blood AND sweat then it seems plain common sense to me that the TS represented a sweat imprint – and that’s without having to make any connections with the Veil of Veronica. But the fact that the latter was the Roman Church’s "central icon" in the 14th century according to the BM’s present director (Neil MacGregor) makes it a racing certainty that the TS was assumed to be a sweat imprint, and that few if any in the era would have entertained ideas of miraculous flashed of light, especially as the image is supposed to have had been covered with blood stains of one kind or another from head to foot. The two ideas of human mortality and miraculous radiation hardly sit well together, would you not agree?

Really, a negative comparable to a brass rubbing? Generally brass rubbings tend to be mostly, at least in concept, two-tone negatives of line drawings. When there is shading, as in these these examples, it is coarse hatching and/or as a result of applied rubbing pressure. Something to think about. But would the negative connection be noted?

The take away quote is this, however:

. . . a racing certainty that the TS was assumed to be a sweat imprint, and that few if any in the era would have entertained ideas of miraculous flashed of light, especially as the image is supposed to have had been covered with blood stains of one kind or another from head to foot.

Quite possibly so!