MEDIEVAL SHROUD WEBSITE
https://medievalshroud.com/how-was-it-done/
WARNING
The truth is that the Shroud has not been sufficiently well examined for a definitive description of the image making method to be derived. Far from being the most studied artefact of all time, all we actually have is a handful of photographs, a few spectroscopic analyses and some sticky tape slides, achieved by pressing tape so weakly onto the cloth that scarcely more than adventitious debris was removed. The fibres adhering were then so thoroughly cleaned in the process of extracting them from the adhesive that it comes as no surprise that almost nothing was discovered on them....
The next of the classic canards is that the image “does not penetrate the threads,” by which it is usually supposed that only the surface fibres – to a depth of two or three – of each thread carry the discolouration of the image, the rest remaining prisitine. The evidence for this is miserably lacking; some say it was discovered by the picking away of surface fibres in 1978, or by simple direct observation.
from https://medievalshroud.com/how-was-it-done/
MC CRONE
The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept at Turin in Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle.
David Sox was one of the founders of the British Society for the Turin Shroud in 1977. With that he became its first General Secretary.
Sox wrote File on the Shroud the following year which suggested the Shroud could be real but it stopped far short from saying that was in any way convincing. He made it clear he wanted to believe.
Walter McCrone stepped in - in that climate.
McCrone got 32 sticky tapes that had been touched to the shroud to test for different things. Debris stuck to the tapes and could be examined under a light microscope. Ray Rogers provided the tapes on loan. It is said that McCrone falsely claimed that half the tapes were his. He had to give them back and felt he was cheated.
That aside he said he could find no traces of paint. But he did find iron oxide particles. There was some trace of mercuric sulfide. One particle of vermilion was identified. On that basis we are told that he assumed in a leap of reasoning that the iron oxide residue was red ochre. He could not find any traces of a binder for this "paint" but did a test for protein which turned positive. But few think this was really a trace of the gelatin binder.
Against McCrone, it was said that iron oxide appears just as much where there is no image. They said the exception was the blood areas which they explained by saying it was possibly iron from the blood.
He said in 1980, "I am not saying the Shroud is not authentic. I am saying that the image area has a lot of iron oxide and a lot of artists' pigment associated with it, but I do not know whether the amount of iron oxide present is sufficient to explain the entire image".
The blood images are too impressive to be really 2000 year old blood!
Visually the paint hypothesis is the best.
`
All tests showed that it was not blood (page 49, Free
Inquiry, Vol 18:2). Two scientists tested the “blood” and found that it was
blood but their conclusion was invalidated by the fact that tempera paint could
still explain the characteristics they associated with real blood (ibid, page
49). These guys were not qualified for making this analysis (page 27, Looking
for a Miracle). At least the Shroudie, Ian Wilson, tells us that there is no
proof for blood on the cloth (page 109, The Blood and the Shroud). There is DNA
on the cloth but it was touched a lot over the years and cells are always being
left behind on the touched item. And if I were going to forge a Turin Shroud I
would use some blood in the pain to give it greater authenticity. I think there
is blood on the cloth but then our modern science would be able to prove it if
there were. Perhaps the amount of blood is so small that tempera paint is the
main body of the blood marks.
One excuse for the evidence of paint is that copies were painted and put on top of the shroud. This needs solid evidence and there is none. It if were happening, a protector surely would have been used? So there was no direct contact. It was unnecessary. Second rate relics typically are only touched briefly to the main relic. For example, a huge cloth can be touched to a saints tooth and that makes the whole crate of cloth a relic.
There was no need for laying out the Shroud on an altar and putting something all over it. Painted copies of the shroud that were touched to it didn’t have enough paint on them to come off to leave a significant reading of the presence of paints on the Shroud. You can see snaps of them in Ian Wilson’s The Blood and the Shroud.
Having said that, the cloth could pass for a very long altar cloth. Size, shape, fold and the image position look too convenient - if it is to be hung for display from a longer side.
McCrone also found evidence that people had been working on the image to preserve it and make it seem more miraculous during the previous two hundred years (page 48, The Turin Shroud is Genuine). He found that iron particles were being added to make the blood. We will see that this idea of interference with the Shroud is backed up by other pieces of evidence. It may be possible that the Shroud was originally a faint painting but was turned into a kind of photograph in the nineteenth century. We must remember that it was never photographed until 1898 when its properties as a negative were first discovered.
McCrone never said the image is a typical painting. It clearly is not from visual inspection. It is a unique technique.Painted bass relief is one suggestion.
APPENDIX
The Origins of the Shroud of Turin - EXCERPTS
Charles Freeman 2014
While we are left with only the faint images of the original painting it remains an interesting question as to whether any pigments of the original paint still remain on the Shroud. The STURP team, which descended on Turin in 1978 with several tons of imaging equipment, removed a number of samples from different areas of the surface of the cloth with sticky tape, which, remarkably, they were allowed to take back to the US for examination, without any requirement that they should be returned to Turin (they do not appear to be kept together in a single archive, hampering further research). A furious argument took place when an expert microscopist, Walter McCrone, who was given the tapes to examine, claimed that he had indeed found pigments, vermilion on the bloodstains and red ochre for the main part of the bodies. Although McCrone does not seem to have known this, vermilion is the pigment used to depict blood on other medieval painted linens, while red ochre is ubiquitous as a medieval pigment. McCrone dated the painting to the middle of the 14th century (ten years before the radiocarbon laboratories came to the same conclusion). Perhaps too many of the STURP members had become convinced of the authenticity of the shroud and they reacted in horror. The samples were removed from McCrone, his findings derided and the STURP report on the physics and chemistry of the Shroud, produced in 1982, argued that there was no evidence that the images were painted and even suggested that the blood was indeed actual human blood. A 1973 forensic examination of the ‘bloodstains’ by Professor Giorgio Frache and colleagues at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Modena had, however, failed to find any trace of blood and even the STURP investigators failed to find potassium, an essential component of blood. The most likely source of STURP’s ‘human blood’ is animal collagen, probably from rabbit-skin glue, which was often used as tempera (a binding medium for pigments) in medieval painting. The stains are too red to be dried blood.
In its report on the physics and chemistry of the Shroud, STURP discussed the possibility of it having been painted but, amazingly, admitted it had not actually examined any paintings on linen. However it did report that ‘colour does not penetrate the cloth in any image area nor is there any evidence for cementation between fibers or capillary flow of liquids’. This was an important observation, even if, due to the team’s lack of specialist knowledge, the authors of the report, Ray Rogers and L.A. Schwalbe, failed to grasp why. Before linen can be painted, a sealing layer of gesso, a binding mixture, needs to be applied, so that the paint can have a surface to stick to. It was a skilled job as, if the gesso penetrated below the surface, then the flexibility of the cloth would have been lost, an important consideration when a flag needs to flutter in the wind or a cloth is dramatically unfurled. The gesso must cover just the outer fibrils of the linen. The details of how to apply it are to be found in the Libro dell’Arte, an advisory manual compiled in the early 15th century by the Tuscan Cennino Cennini. The crucial point is that the gesso has to be applied, not with a brush, but with a knife so it can be put down and scraped off. ‘The less gesso you leave on, the better it is, just so that you fill up the interstices between the threads’, advises Cennini. Over time the gesso surface will have fragmented on the Shroud but arguably this is the brushless outer layer that the STURP team found. (The layer appears to be consistent across both images and across skin, hair and beard.)
What makes good gesso? Ground chalk (calcium carbonate) was used as a major ingredient in the Middle Ages north of the Alps (usually mixed with a collagen of animal glue) and the STURP team found ‘large’ quantities of just this mineral on their tapes. Again they failed to realise that this evidence was crucial in providing support for an original painted surface. (With no expertise in medieval painting, the authors could suggest no more than that the calcium was the accumulation of dust.) In a 2005 paper STURP member Ray Rogers examined segments of threads taken from earlier testing of the Shroud that had been passed to him. On them Rogers found a ‘viscous coating’, consisting of plant gum containing alizarin, a component of madder, a red pigment. This is indicative of a sealed and/or painted surface, although the sample was too small to make any generalisation from it for painting on the Shroud as a whole. The findings of 1978 desperately need reassessment by conservationists in light of the major developments in microscopy of the past 35 years.
So the argument that the Shroud is a painted linen cloth of the 14th century and that it has decayed significantly seems strong but it is important to see whether there is any evidence that contradicts this. In April 1988 the Shroud underwent a radiocarbon test. The most recent method of dating, accelerator-mass-spectrometry (AMS), was selected as it allowed small samples to be taken. A team of experts met with the Church authorities in Turin to select a suitable sample. It was taken from an area away from the images and the fire damage and inwards from the edge of the cloth. It was divided into three sections on site and then given to three laboratories, in Oxford, Tucson and Zurich, who cleaned each of the samples before testing them. A coordinated result from the three laboratories brought up a date range of between 1260 and 1390, with 95 per cent confidence that the cutting of the flax, the moment when the carbon-14 clock would have started ticking, was within it. Attempts to challenge this result (from those determined to pin down a first-century date), by suggesting that either the samples came from a patch rewoven in medieval times or from contamination, have been unsuccessful. Close examination by textile experts has not shown any reweaving and photographs confirm that the bandings of the weave are uninterrupted throughout. As to contamination, critics cannot even agree what the contaminating substance might be, let alone show that, after cleaning by the laboratories, it was twice the weight of the cloth it would need to be if it really was of first-century origin.
Charles Freeman is the author of Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 2011). A new edition of his Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient World was published in 2014 by Oxford University Press.
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