A camera negative in 1898 made the Shroud of Turin's faint figure leap out
When Secondo Pia photographed a long linen cloth in Turin in May 1898, his negative plate showed a man's face and body far more clearly than the faint sepia marks on the fabric itself. That discovery deepened devotion to the Shroud of Turin, a relic whose age has been argued over ever since.
The cloth measures roughly 4.4 by 1.1 metres, woven in a herringbone twill, and carries front and back views of a bearded man with hands folded, head to head at the centre. Reddish stains match the wounds described in the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. Many Christians, especially Catholics, have venerated it as the burial cloth of Jesus.
Its documented story begins in the 1350s at Lirey, a village in north-central France, where a knight named Geoffroi de Charny had endowed a church. Local bishops soon called it a forgery; in 1390 the Bishop of Troyes told the antipope Clement VII that an earlier bishop had identified the artist. Clement allowed it to be shown only as a representation, not a true relic. In 1453 Geoffroi's granddaughter handed it to the Duke of Savoy, and was excommunicated for doing so.
Fire nearly destroyed it in 1532 at Chambéry, when molten silver from its casket burned through the folded linen; Poor Clare nuns stitched patches over the holes. The Savoys moved it to their new capital, Turin, in 1578, and it has stayed there since, passing to the Holy See when the former king Umberto II died in 1983. It survived another fire in 1997 and now lies flat in a bulletproof case filled almost entirely with argon.
Science has not settled the argument. Microscopist Walter McCrone concluded from 1978 samples that the image and stains were painted in pigment, though others disputed him. In 1988 three independent laboratories radiocarbon dated the linen to between 1260 and 1390, a result experts accept despite contamination and repair theories. The Church itself neither endorses nor rejects its authenticity, and more than 2 million people visited its 2010 exhibition.
Source: Shroud of Turin
