First published Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013, under the head, Sometimes I am wrong
I haven't read The Da Vinci Code but I have scanned a book by the painter David Hockney, whose internet-driven survey of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art makes a strong case for a trade secret: use of a camera obscura technique for creating precision realism in paintings.
Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost legacy of the old masters, 2001, uses numerous paintings to show that European art guilds possessed this technical ability, which was a closely guarded and prized secret. Eventually the technique, along with the related magic lantern projector, evolved into photography. It's possible the technique also included the use of lenses and mirrors, a topic familiar to Leonardo da Vinci.
Apparently the first European mention of a camera obscura is in Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus, which contains materials dating from 1478 to 1519.
I didn't know about this when first mulling over the Shroud of Turin controversy and so was quite perplexed as to how such an image could have been formed in the 14th century, when the shroud's existence was first reported. I was mistrustful of the carbon dating, realizing that the Kremlin had a strong motive for deploying its agents to discredit the purported relic.
See my old page posted below or at:
Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin
http://www.angelfire.com/az3/nuzone/shroud.html
But Hockney's book helps to bolster a theory by fellow Brits Lynn Picknell and Clive Prince that the shroud was faked by none other than Leonardo, a scientist, "magician" and intriguer. Their book The Turin Shroud was a major source of inspiration for The Da Vinci Code, it has been reported.
The two are not professional scientists but, in the time-honored tradition of English amateurs, did an interesting sleuthing job.
As they point out, the frontal head image is way out of proportion with the image of the scourged and crucified body. They suggest the face is quite reminiscent of a self-portrait by Leonardo. Yet, two Catholic scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab who used a computer method in the 1980s to analyze the image had supposedly demonstrated that it was "three-dimensional." But a much more recent analysis, commissioned by Picknell and Prince, found that the "three-dimensionalism" did not hold up. From what I can tell, the Jet Propulsion pair proved that the image was not made by conventional brushwork but that further analysis indicates some type of projection.
Picknell and Prince suggest that Leonardo used projected images of a face and of a body -- perhaps a cadaver that had been inflicted with various crucifixion wounds -- to create a death mask type of impression. But the image collation was imperfect, leaving the head size wrong and the body that of, by Mideast standards, a giant. This is interesting, in that Hockney discovered that the camera obscura art often failed at proportion and depth of field between spliced images, just as when a collage piece is pasted onto a background.
Still the shroud's official history begins in 1358, about a hundred years prior to the presumed Da Vinci hoax. It seems plausible that either some shroud-like relic had passed to a powerful family and that its condition was poor, either because of its age or because it wasn't that convincing upon close inspection. The family then secretly enlisted Leonardo, the theory goes, in order to obtain a really top-notch relic. Remember, relics were big business in those days, being used to generate revenues and political leverage.
For if Leonardo was the forger, we must account for the fact that the highly distinctive "Vignon marks" on the shroud face have been found in Byzantine art dating to the 7th century. I can't help but wonder whether Leonardo only had the Mandylion (the face) to work with, and added the body as a bonus (I've tried scanning the internet for reports of exact descriptions of the shroud prior to da Vinci's time but haven't succeeded).
The Mandylion refers to an image not made by hands. This "image of Edessa" must have been very impressive, considering the esteem in which it was held by Byzantium. Byzantium also was rife with relics and with secret arts -- which included what we'd call technology along with mumbo-jumbo. The Byzantine tradition of iconography may have stemmed from display of the Mandylion.
Ian Wilson, a credentialed historian who seems to favor shroud authenticity, made a good case for the Mandylion having been passed to the Knights Templar -- perhaps when the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. The shroud then showed up in the hands of a descendant of one of the Templars after the order was ruthlessly suppressed in 1307. His idea was that the shroud and the Mandylion were the same, but that in the earlier centuries it had been kept folded in four, like a map, with the head on top and had always been displayed that way.
The other possibility is that a convincing relic of only the head was held by the Templars. A discovery at Templecombe, England, in 1951 showed that regional Templar centers kept paintings of a bearded Jesus face, which may well have been copies of a relic that Templar enemies tried to find but couldn't. The Templars had been accused of worshiping a bearded idol.
Well, what made the Mandylion so convincing? A possibility: when the Templars obtained the relic they also obtained a secret book of magical arts that told how to form such an image. This of course implies that Leonardo discovered the technique when examining this manuscript, which may have contained diagrams. Or, it implies that the image was not counterfeited by Leonardo but was a much, much older counterfeit.
Obviously all this is pure speculation. But one cannot deny that the shroud images have a photographic quality but are out of kilter with each other and that the secret of camera obscura projection in Western art seems to stem from Leonardo's studios.
The other point is that the 1988 carbon analysis dated the shroud to the century before Leonardo. If one discounts possible political control of the result, then one is left to wonder how such a relic could have been so skillfully wrought in that era. Leonardo was one of those once-in-a-thousand-year geniuses who had the requisite combination of skills, talents, knowledge and impiety to pull off such a stunt.
Of course, the radiocarbon dating might easily have been off by a hundred years (but, if fairly done, is not likely to have been off by 1300 years).
All in all, I can't be sure exactly what happened, but I am strongly inclined to agree that the shroud was counterfeited by Leonardo based on a previous relic. The previous relic must have been at least "pretty good" or why all the fuss in previous centuries? But, it is hard not to suspect Leonardo's masterful hand in the Shroud of Turin.
Of course, the thing about the shroud is that there is always more to it. More mystery. I know perfectly well that, no matter how good the scientific and historical analysis, trying to nail down a proof one way or the other is a wil o' the wisp.
Retracted opinion:
Science, superstition and the Shroud of Turin
The Shroud of Turin is reputed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The seemingly photographic image couldn't possibly have simply been painted onto the cloth, say supporters of authenticity, some of whom believe that the image was, by a process unknown, burned onto the cloth at the moment of resurrection. The fellow on the cloth, however, appears to be at rest, presumably dead, though perhaps he was on the very brink of resurrection.
One shroud student, who does not favor authenticity, goes so far as to suggest that the shroud was manufactured by some primitive form of photography in the mid-14th Century. This is not an unreasonable conjecture if one is impressed by the strong evidence favoring a physically induced (photographic-like) image and yet is faced with the 1988 mass spectrometer carbon 14 analysis which put the age of the cloth sample at circa 1550.
Electron microscopy of alleged blood stains on the cloth show plainly that the 'blood' isn't blood at all but is an artist's paint pigment, according to microscopist Walter McCrone, who has also debunked the Vineland Map.
McCrone does not offer a plausible idea of how an artist could have been so skilled as to convey a photographic image, a skill that was far beyond the means of his contemporaries and, without electronic assistance, is beyond the means of 20th/21st Century artists. Also, his web site does not (at least directly) tell us the provenance of his samples; without that, we cannot be sure of their authenticity.
At this point I would like to offer some seemingly 'out there' conjectures on the carbon 14 issue:
1) The KGB or some other militantly atheist force intercepted the cloth samples en route to the labs and switched them. Remember, it was 1988, when the Soviet Union was coming unhinged.
The Soviets were well aware of the role that Christian belief played in the hearts of the Poles as they were rattling the chains of communism and threatening the continued existence of the Warsaw pact. Any publicity that threw cold water on anything smacking of Christian miracles would have been very welcome to the party chiefs.
2) The resurrection -- if that's what imposed a photographic image onto the cloth -- altered the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the cloth.
We are aware that high heat, such as from a nuclear explosion, can sear an image onto surfaces such as brick walls. So, we may suppose that the shroud image was instilled with a blast of heat, perhaps originating, by an unknown process, from the body.
Now carbon 14 has two more nucleons than carbon 12. The carbon 14 atom is unstable, meaning that every now and then the extra nucleons come loose, leaving a carbon 12 atom.
The precise moment and conditions for such an event are, by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, fundamentally unknowable. But quantum statistics can be used to say what ratio of carbon 14 atoms to carbon 12 atoms should exist. Carbon 14's half-life of about 5,000 years says that for a particular amount of carbon 14, half of it will have decayed into carbon 12 after about 5,000 years.
However, problems with the dating procedure are illustrated by the fact that carbon 12/carbon 14 ratios are out of kilter in the era of nuclear weapon explosions. These explosions have added carbon 14 into the atmosphere and hence into organic materials, such as cotton.
Similarly, space-based radiation storms -- perhaps very high energy gamma rays -- can cause high-altitude air molecules to be sufficiently agitated to yield a large number of collisions of enough force to fuse loose nucleons into a carbon 12 atom. That is, carbon 14 can be formed from carbon 12 in the presence of enough energy and ionized hydrogen. Ionized hydrogen would also tend to form through sufficient agitation of the air molecules.
In other words, under certain conditions the carbon 14/carbon 12 ratio can be altered, giving perhaps a misleading impression of a sample's age.
The carbon 14 test data might alternatively be read as an indication of the heat on hand at the time, which could have caused a percentage of cloth molecules to be transformed from carbon 12 to carbon 14.
A problem with this scenario is that the carbon 14 dating is very close to the date of the first recorded public mention of the shroud in the mid-14th Century. In other words, isn't it odd that the carbon 14/carbon 12 ratio just happens to coincide with that date? Why not the 12th century, or the 19th?
3) We also cannot exclude the possibility that time itself was bent under the force of the 'resurrection event,' if that's what it was. Although this may seem like a childish extension of Einstein's general relativity theory, there is surely a lot more to time than meets the eye.
One of the most profound discoveries about time, both in relativity theory and in quantum theory, is that it has a necessary subjectivism. In fact, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics makes one wonder how hard and fast history really is.
If the shroud event was unusual enough, we might conjecture that the shroud's timeline (technically called a 'worldline') deviated from the timelines of other artifacts of the 1st century.
However, the weakness of this scenario is that, supposedly, pollen and bacterial residues are consistent with 1st Century Palestine.
Considering that options 2) and 3) are flawed and also considering that the imprint has photographic precision and is known to date to at least the mid-14th Century, we might consider the possibility that the imprint was devised by a very clever 14th Century technician.
But the man's wounds are those consistent with scourging and crucifixion. In fact, they are reportedly so accurate that it appears that the image was made of a crucified man. So the technician apparently was also involved in a homicide.
But again, there is no serious evidence from the 14th Century that such a 'primitive' imaging technology ever occurred elsewhere in Europe or the Mediterranean.
These leaves us with option 1) as the most likely scenario.
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