Shroud of Turin

[okasha]

67. Actually, your excitable friend

may have inadvertently provided a bit of evidence in favor of the photgraphic origin of the image. While the collagen medium he describes is not appropriate for tempera, it is the kind of medium (basically gelatin from animal sources) used to make photographic emulsion, the mixture coated onto the paper or other support that actually creates the image from darkened silver particles. I'm not clear yet whether McCrone claimed to find particles of vermilion or traces of mercury that he claimed indicated the presence of vermilion, which is extracted from cinnabar, a mercury bearing ore. If it is the presence of mercury he claimed, then again, we connect to early photo processes. Daguerre developed the first durable photo images in the presence of mercury vapor some 500 years later.

The lack of other early photographic negatives isn't surprising. If this one hadn't been carefully preserved as a relic, it wouldn't exist now, either. Bear in mind--it is a negative image. A negative image would not be intelligible to most people even today, much less medieval folk who had never seen one before. Look around your home or your office. If you display photographs, they're positive prints; the negatives are presumably tucked away somewhere in an envelope. To put it bluntly, there wouldn't have been any market for negative pictures of grandpa. Much better to get one of the clerks from the local monastery to paint a nice little tempera miniature of the old fella.

The other thing to bear in mind is that we have lost far more medieval and Renaissance art than we now have, including portraits of kings and queens. For example, Hans Holbein was working for Henry VIII by the 1530's. Presumably he would have painted Henry's second queen, Anne Boleyn, and probably her daughter, the future Elizabeth I. Yet those paintings either have not survived or have not been found. We don't have a verified picture of H's #5 wife, Katherine Howard, or of Jane Grey, the queen for nine days. And here we're talking about an era in which monarchs actively collected art and recognized its value.

Fiber art is of any kind is far more fragile. The sad truth is that even the shroud, if it had not been given into the custody of the ruling house of Savoy, would likely have wound up in a petticoat or as a tablecloth when the image faded and would have been lost forever. If there were any other such images, they likely met such a fate. As with actual paintings, we have very little in the way of fabric art from the medieval or renaissance periods. Many of the pieces that do survive are, like the shroud, unique.

If there is further testing, I hope the Bishop of Turin will allow a wider range of tests than previously. Actually, I hope the Church will relinquish custory of the shroud altogether. One thing Nickell says that is absolutely indisputable, and that is that the fabric is extremely fragile and should not be exposed to light any more than necessary. It needs to be stored flat, in a lightproof archival container, and kept in an environment controlled for temperature and humidity. And while I'm sure the Turin cathedral staff and sisters handle it with great care and love, it needs to be in the hands of professional conservators.