The Strange Images
Most scholars accept the gory implications of the forensic story of the bloodstains on the Shroud. (See It's Real Blood). However, the faint shadowy images of a man on the Shroud are more controversial. No one knows how these images, one of a man’s back on the lower half of the Shroud, and a man’s front on the upper half, were formed. They could not have been painted, as some suppose. The chemistry and physics of the image chromophore—that which gives visible image—are now well understood by researchers, but the method by which the images were created remains a mystery.
The images are the result of a selective, color producing chemical change at the surface of discreet lengths of some cellulous fibers of the linen. These chemical changes could not have been produced with paint, dye, stain or liquid chemical; there is no evidence of any matting, capillarity, wicking, or penetration expected from liquids. Also, numerous tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud confirm that the images were not painted.
The images, closely examined with the aid of microscopes and microphotography, are similar to halftone images, in which shades of color are derived from pixels of a single color, like a picture in a newspaper. The images on the Shroud are not black and white, but they are monochromatic. That is, they are of a single color often described as sepia or straw yellow. The color produced by the chemical change to the fibers is constant and the various darker and lighter tones of color we perceive are the result of the density of the altered fibers. It is interesting to note that on a high quality inkjet printer (1200 dots per inch), the ink droplets are about 60 microns across, whereas on the Shroud, the image-bearing fibrils are only about 15 microns thick or about one fifth the thickness of typical human hair.
Another interesting attribute of the images is that they are negative—that is, the darker and lighter tones of color are reversed. In that sense, the images on the Shroud are like photographic negatives. This was discovered more than a century ago, when in 1898, a photographer named Secondo Pia took the first-ever photographs of the Shroud with a large box camera. When developing his photographs, he discovered that images that appeared on the glass plate negatives were positive images, startling in clarity and realistic appearance. For the first time people could see the amazing detail in the Shroud’s images, detail people had not previously been able to observe. The detail is there in the negative images, but the human mind is not well adapted to interpreting negative images. With Pia’s discovery, what for centuries had appeared only as ghostlike images were shown to be graphically clear front and back pictures of a man.
But they may not be pictures at all. At least they are not pictures of a human face or body in a traditional sense. Like any picture that tries to convey a sense of dimensionality, by showing how light is reflected from objects, faces and bodies, the images on the Shroud look like pictures with reflected light. However, image analysts tell us they are not.
When we look at the face of the man of the Shroud, we certainly seem to see depth from the play of light. Look at the tip of the nose, at the sides of the cheeks and the recesses of the eyes. But where is the light coming from? What is its direction? Image analysts, using computerized tools, tell us there is no light directionality at all. It doesn’t come from the left or the right, from above or below, or from the front. The areas of darker and lighter color are not encoded light. They are not pictures by the hand and eyes of an artist. Nor are they some form of medieval proto-photography as some have suggested in a vague attempt to explain the images’ photographic-like negativity.
It turns out that the Shroud images are terrain maps. This means that each color shade represents the distance between the cloth and the part of the body the cloth is covering at that point. To illustrate, the hazy donut shape shown here is an example of a terrain map for the crater rendered next to it as a three-dimensional shape. The lighter colored areas of the fuzzy donut shape represent higher altitude in this terrain map.
In the case of the Shroud, we do not get a perfect three-dimensional rendering for many reasons. First, the distance could be distorted by the drape of the cloth. We can assume it was not perfectly flat. Physicists have estimated that the maximum distance represented is about 3 or 4 centimeters—that is, no image is present for parts of the body that are more than about one and a half inches distance from the cloth. We don’t know how linear the scale might be in the image formation process; e.g., is twice as close twice as light. We might know the linearity if we knew how the images were created, but we don’t. Also, the image is very old—medieval or much older—and we don’t know how fading or maturing of the images and the aging of the cloth might have altered the accuracy of the distance that is encoded. Finally the bloodstains and dirt certainly cause distortions. That there is a distance encoded representation at all is amazing and puzzling.
It is important to point out that no identified works of art, artifacts or relics of any kind will produce a 3D plot like the one produced from the Shroud. Researchers have tried every imaginable artistic method including bas-relief rubbings, scorching with hot statues, daubing the surface with pigment dust, and image transfer rubbings. Nothing works to produce a 3D plot.
Some researchers have suggested that the images might have been formed by some perfectly natural process such as a chemical reaction between funerary spices and bodily fluids. Some also suggest that a reaction between gaseous products produced by a dying body and chemicals used on the linen cloth for washing or softening might have induced images. The working premise for a naturalistic explanation has generally been that the Shroud may be the authentic burial cloth of the historical Jesus, but that the process through which the images were created conforms to the laws of nature but are not yet understood. So far, no method has been found that will produce the chemical change to the cloth’s fibrils, produce the negative image, and produce a spatially encoded terrain map, leading other scholars to posit a supernatural explanation for the mysterious images.
The images pick up where the bloodstains leave off in revealing even more pathological detail. They reveal details of piercing wounds, lacerations, bruises, contusions, and abrasions, all of which are medically accurate to the trained eye of forensic pathologists. It is on the images of the arms that we see the traces of rivulets of blood. It is on the man’s chest, between the fifth and sixth ribs that we see what looks like an elliptical gash from which the blood may have flowed to under the man’s lower back. We also see what appear to be wounds on his wrists. The details are very accurate, but medical experts acknowledge that at the time of the middle ages, nobody had the knowledge of human pathology to be able to depict these images with such precision. How would a relic forger be able translate such medically accurate detail, both front and back images, onto the long piece of linen cloth without such knowledge?
What emerges from the cloth is an epic story, a pictorial reenactment of the passion sequence: the scourging, the walk to Calvary, the crucifixion, and the burial. From the appearance of certain wounds we can surmise that the man of the Shroud was savagely flogged. Whatever was used, it is consistent with a Roman flagrum, a whip of short leather thongs tipped with bits of lead, bronze or bone which tore into flesh and muscle. There are dozens upon dozens of dumbbell shaped welts and contusions, the type of wound that the flagellum would have caused. There is blood from the flagellation and even a bit of tissue thought by medical experts to be a torn-out bit of muscle. From the angles of attack—the way the marks fall on the man’s back, buttocks, and legs—it seems that man was whipped by two men, one taller than the other, who stood on either side of him.
At some time, the man may have been forced to wear a crown of thorns. That seems to be a logical explanation for the numerous puncture wounds about the top of his head. But from the pattern of wounds and drops of blood, it seems to have been more like a rough bunch of thorns, or a cap of thorns, and not like the wreath shaped crown of thorns so common in artistic depictions. There are details in the Shroud images that suggest both a beating and falling: a severally bruised left kneecap, a dislocated or possibly broken nasal cartilage, a large swelling around the right eye socket and cheekbone. There is also the puzzling observation that there seem to have been significant abrasions on both shoulders. On the shoulders, where there are welts from the apparent scourging, the welts are abraded as though rubbed over. Might this be from carrying something heavy across both shoulders, perhaps the patibulum, the crossbeam of the cross?
What is most interesting is that the man of the Shroud was crucified with large spikes driven through his wrists and not through the palms of his hands, something which contradicts all iconography of medieval and pre-medieval periods. This is evidenced by both the images and the bloodstains. This is, of course, more historically and medically plausible. It was not before the first part of the 20th century, that medical experts first realized that nails driven through a man’s palms would not support his weight—even if his feet were nailed or supported—and that the nails would tear out. That the Romans did crucify victims by driving large nails through the wrist area of the forearm was confirmed by the 1968 archeological discovery of a crucifixion victim, named Johanan ben Ha-galgol, found near Jerusalem at Giv’at ha-Mivtar. If indeed the Shroud is a medieval forged relic, the craftsman who produced it knew how to do it right even if the nailing, the scalp wounds, and the man’s nakedness defied the sensibilities of the time.
The story suggested by the stains and images on the Shroud is more mind-numbing than all other depictions ever made; from the earliest carvings of the crucifixion on 5th century coffins; from the wall painting of the passion so prominent in old English parish churches; from the imaginative grandeur of paintings by Rubens, Raphael, El Greco, and Velazquez; and from the spiritual visualizations of Salvador Dali. The shroud stirs our imagination more than the drama of medieval mystery plays still performed in York or modern Broadway musicals and movies. It evokes more emotion than the great moving hymns “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” or “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded.” It is, in the story it tells of the passion sequence, a picture not of a thousand words but a million. It doesn’t seem like art.
Are we to imagine that a medieval craftsman knew of some method for producing the images, unknown or unrecognized by modern science? Whatever it was it seems to be without precedent in the arts, among other known relics, and among other artifacts of history. Whatever process a medieval craftsman might have used, it seems never to have been exploited since. Every innovation in art and image technology is exploited. It is difficult to imagine that if some artist or crafter of fake relics invented a unique method, that there are no other examples of its use found anywhere. The images are that unique.
There is, of course, another possibility. Perhaps the crafter of relics was surprised to find images after he laid a bloody, crucified corpse onto his cloth. Perhaps, some unexplained chemical reaction occurred that formed the images. Perhaps the images were serendipitous in the process of forging a blood-only relic. We might think this possible, were it not for many other factors that must be considered. But first, let’s look at the prima facie case for medieval provenance.
