Science And The Shroud

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What D'Arcis's letter sketched out, documents left by 16th century nuns described in detail: the 14-ft.-long, herringbone-twill linen cloth of which the bishop spoke did bear the image of a naked and bearded man about 6 ft. tall, hair in a loose ponytail, back apparently scourged with a multithonged whip, hands crossed modestly before him. The figure was already faded then: a more recent witness described it as having "both the color and character of faint scorch marks on a well-used ironing cover." But not so faint that, D'Arcis excepted, people doubted who it was. Believers continued to converge on Lirey. Later, after the shroud fell into the possession of Italy's royal Savoy family and was moved to Turin, the church granted it its own feast day, and crowds viewing its public showings grew so thick that some pilgrims died of suffocation.

The Middle Ages, of course, were salad days for relics, real and fake (churches in Constantinople and Angeli boasted heads of John the Baptist), and as the centuries rolled on, bits of the True Cross or Our Lady's shoe faded from prominence within their gilded reliquaries. What catapulted the shroud into its role as a modern touchstone was the testimony of a thoroughly modern invention: the camera. On May 28, 1898, a city councillor named Secondo Pia took the first photographs of the relic. One scholar recounts that as the negative image began to appear in his darkroom, Pia "nearly dropped the plate." Markings that had been faint on the cloth suddenly jumped out with such extraordinary clarity and added detail that "he felt certain he was looking on the face of Jesus." And, in subsequent exposures, his body. The lance wound in the chest and the bloody rivulets where a crown of thorns might have bitten were suddenly vividly manifest. It was eerie. As sindonologist Ian Wilson puts it in his new book, The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Sacred Relic Is Real (Free Press; 333 pages; $25), "The clear implication was that the shroud itself was, in effect, a photographic negative that had been waiting dormant, like a preprogrammed time capsule, for the moment that photography's invention would release its hidden true 'positive.'"