Leonardo da Vinci
Yet attempts to prove the shroud is fake continue. Why?
Two decades later, people are still trying to prove the Shroud is fake. One of the claims by proponents of authenticity is that even with modern technology, no one has been able to reproduce the images. Skeptics saw that as a challenge. Many attempts were made to show how a forger might have created the image. It was, some said for awhile, a fairly conventional painting. But when that was proved wrong, other explanations were sought. Emily Craig, a forensic anthropologist, argued that it was a portrait in pigment dust that was transferred to a piece of cloth by rubbing. No, said others, it was a medieval photograph, perhaps made by Leonardo da Vinci. A room-size camera was created to show that such a device might have been invented. A life-size photograph of a statue was made on cloth with this bigger than life-size camera. It was, as far as logic went, like making a printing press and printing a Bible to show that Leonardo might have invented printing. The photograph looked something like the Shroud. But looking like and being like are two very different things. The photograph was not chemically or physically like the images on the Shroud. This was not how the images on the Shroud were created. That was obvious.
Did Leonardo da Vinci Do It?
There is the much ballyhooed, Dan Brown-on-steroids myth in the blogosphere and the world of cultish books that Leonardo da Vinci created the images with a primitive medieval room-sized camera.
You can infer anything you want if you are selective with facts, promote conjecture, argue that the absence of evidence is evidence and mix in a bit suspicion. It makes for a nice mental mess called an apophenia; a belief in the connectedness of unrelated and meaningless observations.
For instance, the proponents of this conspiracy theory—and that is what it is—will tell you that the chemicals needed to make photographs existed in Leonardo’s day. But they also existed when cave dwellers painted their walls in Lascaux just about 16,000 years ago. They point out that Leonardo was a genius and he knew about the camera obscura, a box or room that enables you to project, through a pinhole or a simple lens, images on a piece of paper or a wall. But so did many scholars at the time of Leonardo. They just didn’t write about it as he did. Long before Leonardo, Abū Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham of Basra (965-1039), a Muslim philosopher, mathematician and scientist extraordinaire explained the camera obscura his Book of Optics.
He Looks Like Leonardo da Vinci
But, the proponents of the da Vinci theory go on to say, the man on the shroud looks like Leonardo. Maybe. But he looks like John Lennon when he sported a beard, and Vincent Van Gogh, and Michelangelo. But, they go on to say, that they have made very precise comparative measurements to Leonardo’s face. No they have not! They have made very precise measurements to a drawing. Leonardo believed in ideal proportions in faces and bodies. He wrote about it and made drawings to demonstrate the idea. He applied those proportions in his drawings and paintings. The most we can say is that face of the man on the shroud compares favorably to ideal proportions. (But others, on web sites, argue that the shroud must be fake because the proportions of the face are unlike any real face. Go figure.)
I have never encountered a historian of the medieval, or an image analyst or a chemist who has studied the images who thinks that the shroud is a photograph. The scientific proof that it is not is something we will get to in time. It’s a cockamamie idea but it has mythical traction.
Picknett and Prince
Nonetheless, from the computer keyboards of two enterprising and highly skilled conspiracy theorists, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, comes a tale that turns logic on its head. In a defense against a copyright infringement charge, Dan Brown states that works by Picknett and Prince were an important inspiration for The DaVinci Code. There works include:
· The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Life of Jesus
· The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
· The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline
· The Stargate Conspiracy
· Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History
Among the last two, it is hard to tell which conspiracy theory is easier to swallow. In Stargate we learn that the CIA and MI5 are manipulating a secret cult of powerful and rich leaders, including leading scientists who believe that they are in direct contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings from the star Sirius. These extraterrestrial beings are claiming to be the gods of ancient Egypt, the very gods responsible for the image of a face on Mars. Why are secret American and British agents, with help from NASA, doing this? To create a new insidious mind-control religion. As icing on the cake:
We reveal the ground-breaking research that provides a plausible answer to the most enduring questions about the ancient Egyptians' achievements and beliefs - and, explosively, uncover the true nature of the gods themselves . . .
Leonard da Vinci Fooling Us All?
In How Leonard da Vinci Fooled History we learn that he secretly invented photography and then created a gigantic camera obscura, discovered how to make film out of linen, how to develop the picture and fix it. He was a genius, after all, they remind us. He understood the camera obscura (as had many educated people in Alhazen’s day and since). He had experimented with chemistry (as had many educated people). He might have had a motive. The authors on their website tell us he was, “[a] known joker, conjuror and illusionist, and a Church-hating heretic.”
A big problem for Picknett and Prince was the fact that Leonardo was born a century after the shroud was exhibited in Lirey. It was therefore necessary that he have an opportunity to replace that shroud with the one of his own making. He might have been welcome at the Savoy family palace. After all they had one of his drawings. “he had the means, opportunity and motive to create this extraordinary work.” Not only did he do all these things, dabbing on blood in all the right places, he replaced the head of the crucifixion model with a photograph of his own head. Picknett and Prince figured this out by comparing the head to a drawing of Leonardo and found the eyes and the nose and the mouth were all in the same place.
Alhazen Better that Leonardo
I would have done better. I would have chosen Alhazen. Although not a great Italian painter like Leonardo—which we tend to forget these days as we imagine him a leader of a totally fictitious secret cult, the Priory of Sion, and a schemer who hid a picture of Mary of Magdala in his Last Supper—he was everything else that Leonardo was and much more. Born in Basra around 965, he became the greatest scientist of his era. He was a physicist, a chemist, an anatomist, a mathematician and a philosopher. He is regarded by some as the first philosopher of science and the founder of the scientific method. His Book of Optics, translated in Toledo during the 12th century in a scriptorium much like the one at the monastery of San Nicola of Casole, is a classic. His descriptions of the camera obscura rival those of Leonardo. His knowledge of the way light is reflected from surfaces, so wonderfully shown in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. If we can imagine that Leonardo invented photography, used it once, made no record of the fact—he was a prolific documenter—we can imagine that Alhazen did so. He might have travelled to Constantinople and found an opportunity to exchange the Image of Edessa with the fake relic of his own making. Might we imagine a motive. Surely: He was Muslim.
Herschel Even a Better Choice
Herschel, however, is my favorite choice. Room sized cameras obscura were scattered about England in his lifetime, although they were a far cry from being able to produce life-sized images, as was the case in Leonardo’s days. They were a favorite amusement in public parks and at the beach. Hanging a crucifixion victim out in the sun for several days might have been a problem in merry old England of the time. But then, too, many strange things were done in those days in the name of science. As for opportunity, Herschel was a world traveler—he met up with his friend Charles Darwin in South Africa. Sir John Herschel, knight of the Royal Guelphic Order, a Fellow of the Royal Society, someone whom Charles Darwin called “one of our greatest philosophers,” would have certainly been welcome in Savoy’s royal palace. As for motive, we might be able to weave one, just as we might for Leonardo or Alhazen. Herschel was an English Christian in the middle of the 19th century—his grandfather was Jewish. It might well be supposed that in this time of turbulent Catholic revival in England—the Tractarians, the Newmanites and the Puseyites—that Herschel like many of his peers were prejudiced against the Roman Catholic Church.
Leonardo Struck a Chord
The Leonardo da Vinci theory struck a chord with those who doubted the shroud’s authenticity and had come to realize it was not a painting or some other form of art. It stuck. It wasn’t, after all, until 2005 that we learned that the carbon dating was invalid. It stuck despite the fact that there isn’t the slightest bit of scientific or historical evidence that Leonardo had anything to do with the shroud or even knew about it. It stuck even though it was historically implausible to think that Leonardo or anyone like him leapfrogged all the optical and chemical technology of later centuries to create two life-size photographs on a fourteen-foot long piece of cloth; technologies never exploited or documented by the man who documented so much. And if this isn’t enough, Leonardo carefully added the poker holes, limestone dust from the environs of Jerusalem, nearly invisible persistent creases and real human blood as though anticipating modern forensic science.
Why Not!
Alan D. Adler, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Western Connecticut University, in an article, “The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin,” commented on those advancing this theory:
[they] propose a photochemical mechanism with sunlight reflected from a statue via optics to image on sheet of cloth charged with a mixture of egg white and chromium salts. As this is an albedo image, it will fail a VP-8 test and there is no chemical or spectroscopic evidence for their chemical sensitizers. They do not deal with the blood image problem [“exudates from clotted wounds transferred to the cloth by its being in contact with a wounded human male body”]. Leonardo may rest easily in his grave. (40)
Who Knew More First
Leonardo da Vinci beat Lambert to the punch as did Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo’s early teacher and mentor, explaining and diagramming the principles of modeling, which enabled the three-dimension representation of objects and people on a two-dimensional surface. But Lambert formalized the principles in more formal mathematical terms. It was Lambert who used the Latin word for whiteness, albedo. He assigned values to black and white and defined how all the shades of gray in between were to be specified. Black was 0. White was 1. Gray, halfway between was, well half, or 0.5. For those of us not enamored with decimals we can use a range between 0 and 100%, as photographers do.
The Play of Light
Everything that we see with our eyes is the play of light reflected off of objects, faces, horses running by and mountains. On the other hand, when we look at a realistic looking painting, perhaps a portrait of someone, we are looking at how the artist saw the play of light and translated it to canvas. Or, and this is often the case, it is how something or some scene might have been if the artist could have seen it. Leonardo da Vinci certainly wasn’t at the Last Supper but he was able to imagine how the play of light might have been, often with the help of models.
Not all works by artists are as realistic looking as those of Leonardo. For instance, look at the pictures in the Hungarian Pray Manuscript. There is no shading. There is no geometric perspective. Leonardo and Andrea del Verrocchio were early pioneers these methods we have come to expect in paintings. Nevertheless, with angles and placement alone, the ancient Hungarian pictures still provides a sense of depth.
Picknett and Prince and 3D
Even Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their recent book, The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History, recognized the problem. “The 3-D information contained in the Shroud was, we were led to believe, an odd and extremely unusual property of the Shroud image,” they wrote. “Neither paintings nor photographs, unless they are taken under very specific conditions, behave in such a way.” They continued:
Quite spontaneously, without any special adjustments to the Analyzer, the 3-D images, now so familiar from Shroud literature, appeared on the screen. The moment has gone down in Shroud history as almost rivaling the revelation of Secondo Pia’s first sight of the negative effect.
Common sense, however, suggests that there has to have been more to it than that. It is a matter of scale, of calibration. The Image Analyzer simply determines the relative intensity of different points on an image. To display it in a form recognizable to us, it needs to know the distance represented by a given change in intensity, i.e., the scale. . . . There is no way that any machine, no matter how sophisticated, can work this out for itself. . . . In the case of the Shroud image, you just have to keep adjusting the scale until you get the most recognizable picture of a human body. . . . This in itself does not mean that the Shroud image has no 3-D information, but it does show that there must be more to the tale of the spontaneous appearance of the image without giving the Analyzer the required scale.
When we began our collaboration with Andy [Haveland-Robinson, a computer animations expert], we, like all other Shroudies, believed that the Shroud exhibits amazing, inexplicable, and unique 3-D information. Though we were persuaded that Leonardo had created the image, we could not see how he had managed to produce that particular effect and felt that attempting to replicate it would be a real stumbling block in our experimental work. Now we faced no such problem, for the much vaunted 3-D information simply does not exist, at least to the degree that we have been led to believe by the VP-8 pictures, and not beyond that explicable by the even lighting caused by a lengthy exposure in the sun. In that sense, the “3-D information” supports rather than undermines the photographic hypothesis. (42)
Caused by a Lengthy Exposure in the Sun?
Picknett and Prince should have stopped while they were ahead. Even lighting, “caused by a lengthy exposure in the sun” has nothing to do with creating the sort of data contained in a height-field, data that represents distance. As the sun journeys across the sky, its rays strike the body being photographed from different angles. It softens harsh shadows. Every professional photographer knows the problem of harsh shadows caused by the sun. If you have ever witnessed an advertising photo shoot, you have certainly seem the large white reflectors, sometimes held aloft by assistants, used to spread out the sun’s light and make it strike models from different angles. But even lighting does not make for spatial information any more so than does uneven lighting.
If the sun perhaps rose in east and travelled about in a pinwheel fashion casting at different times of days light from every part of the sky, we might get a enough softening to elicit a simulation of 3D for the gross shape of the head and body but not for discrete features. But a sun travelling from East to West, even with an arc, will not do what Picknett and Prince imply. To suggest, that the 3-D information to a degree does not exist and that yet it supports rather than undermines their hypothesis that the image on the shroud is medieval photograph by Leonardo is curious double speak. An experiment, a simple experiment would have shown how wrong they were.
Adjusting Scale
With any height-field, you can adjust the scale to just about anything you want. You can make crest of a crater’s edge or the nose on the shroud face seem as high as Mount Everest or so low that only an ant could notice the perturbations on the surface. Not knowing the scale is not a problem if you have a basis for estimating it. For instance, if you are reasonably sure that the image is of a man, adjusting the scale to what seems reasonable for a man is appropriate.
Picknett and Prince were right when they wrote, “we . . . believed that the Shroud exhibits amazing, inexplicable, and unique 3-D information. . . . we could not see how [Leonardo da Vinci] had managed to produce that particular effect and felt that attempting to replicate it would be a real stumbling block in our experimental work. Had they tried they would have certainly found that it was a real stumbling block.
Hair Color Has Nothing to do with Light
The reason that the hair appears blond in the images may have nothing to do with ethnicity and everything to do with chemistry. Rogers has suggested:
I believe that the most important effect of the hair was to impede the diffusion of gases (vapors). This would concentrate them in the area of the hair. More would diffuse through the cloth in that area. A higher concentration of vapors from the nose and mouth would appear on the back side of the cloth in back of the hair. I still believe that diffusion of gases can explain many of the observations on the image and its chemistry.
The idea that the man of the shroud looks European is highly subjective. Take a few minutes to read skeptical accounts on the Internet and you will see over and over that it the gaunt appearance, combined with the whitish hair that conveys that impression. You will also read statements like, “I read that Leonardo da Vinci photographed it,” or “I heard it has been proven to be a painting,” or “carbon dating proved it’s a fake,” or “linen is biodegradable and can’t last 2000 years.” I suppose linen found with the Dead Sea Scroll or the wrappings of mummies from 4500 years ago don’t count. But the indo-European appearance resonates with many people. But does appearance equate to reality?
Continuous Tone Negative
It's possible to imagine that this appearance is what a crafter of fake relics wanted to create; perhaps to portray some imagined idea of what the Resurrection was like. But the reason they look ghostlike is that they are continuous tone negative images. When photographed, the negative of what is already a negative become the extraordinarily photographic like image we commonly see. Could the image on the Shroud, in fact, be a photograph?
Near the end of the fifteenth century, about 130 years after the Shroud's first public exhibition in Europe, Leonardo da Vinci described a camera obscura (a pinhole camera) in his notebooks. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) understood the principle and so did a tenth century Arabian scholar, Alhazen who used a tent-sized camera obscura for observing the cosmos. In Alhazen's tent images were projected onto a wall where they could be traced or copied by hand. It wasn't until 1727 when Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that silver mixed with nitric acid created a photosensitive compound that turned dark when exposed to light. And, it wasn't until 1816 when Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura with a sensitized paper to create an image. In 1834, Henry Fox Talbot created the first stable photographic negative on paper soaked in silver chloride.
Had someone, perhaps, invented photography several centuries earlier even though there is no written evidence or samples of photographic experiments or works? Is the Shroud the work of a scientific genius whose accomplishments are lost to history? While some people have opined that it might be, there is ample evidence the Shroud is not a photograph.
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