{"it":{"id":"NX-A47","name":"Shroud of Turin","kind":"artifact","sub":"Disputed","place":"Turin, Italy","lat":45.07306,"lon":7.68583,"date":"AD 1260-1390 (radiocarbon, 1988)","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"t":"Wikidata Q178331","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q178331"},{"t":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989) abstract","u":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"},{"t":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989), doi 10.1038/337611a0 (abstract: \"mediaeval\"; numeric range in paywalled full text)","u":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":6,"coord_basis":"find-spot / event place (Wikidata/Wikipedia coordinate)","flag":"provenance problem","sum":"A linen cloth in Turin carries the faint image of a man who seems to have been crucified. In 1898 a photograph by Secondo Pia showed that the image behaves like a negative.\n\nThe cloth was first shown at Lirey, in France, in the 1350s. It moved to Turin in 1578 and to a royal chapel there in 1694. On 21 April 1988 a strip about 10 by 70 mm was cut from one corner. Laboratories in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich dated pieces of it. In 1989 they reported in Nature that the linen dates to AD 1260 to 1390, with 95% confidence, and called it \"mediaeval\".\n\nWhat is hard to explain is how the image was made, and whether the dated corner speaks for the whole cloth.\n\nThe mainstream view is the 1989 result: the linen is medieval. Raymond Rogers, a chemist at Los Alamos who had studied the cloth's fibres, disagreed in 2005. He wrote that the sampled area was coated with a plant gum holding dye, that it \"was not part of the original cloth\", and that the date was \"not valid\" for the shroud's age. From the lack of vanillin in the fibres, he put the cloth at between 1300 and 3000 years old. He called for new dating of several fully characterised samples.\n\nDoes one corner of the shroud tell us the age of all of it?","nsrc":4,"new":1,"qs":["The Shroud dates to AD 1260–1390 by three labs, yet its image reads like a photographic negative. How was it made?","A bishop called it a painting in 1389. Why does the debate still burn more than 600 years later?","If the Shroud were proven a medieval artwork beyond doubt, would believers change their minds? Should they?"],"why":"Three laboratories dated the Shroud of Turin to the Middle Ages. A chemist said they tested the wrong thread.","yt":"Read the 1988 Nature paper.","rel":["NX-A49"],"hook":"Three labs dated the Shroud to AD 1260–1390. A chemist said they tested a repair."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-A47","qs":["Three labs dated the Shroud to AD 1260 to 1390. What would it take to overturn that result?","Rogers said the sample was a later repair. Should the cloth be sampled again?","How could anyone in the 1350s have made an image that behaves like a photographic negative?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Shroudofturin1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shroudofturin1.jpg","title":"Shroudofturin1.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Unknown author","cap":"Photo of Shroud of Turin","alt":"Photo of Shroud of Turin"}],"ms":[{"a":"Radiocarbon range","v":"AD 1260-1390","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"a":"Dating labs","v":"Arizona, Oxford, Zurich (AMS)","u":"","b":"V","g":"VERIFIED","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"a":"Dating year","v":"1988","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"a":"First photograph","v":"1898, Secondo Pia","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"a":"Radiocarbon range","v":"AD 1260-1390","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989), doi 10.1038/337611a0 (abstract: \"mediaeval\"; numeric range in paywalled full text)","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"},{"a":"Result","v":"linen is mediaeval","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989) abstract","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Shroud of Turin","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin"},{"t":"Wikidata Q178331","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q178331"},{"t":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989) abstract","u":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"},{"t":"Damon et al., Nature 337:611 (1989), doi 10.1038/337611a0 (abstract: \"mediaeval\"; numeric range in paywalled full text)","u":"https://www.nature.com/articles/337611a0"},{"id":"VNX-A47-5","t":"Damon et al. (1989), Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin, Nature (shroud.com copy)","u":"https://www.shroud.com/nature.htm"},{"id":"VNX-A47-6","t":"Shroud of Turin radiocarbon dating paper (PDF copy, metalogos.org)","u":"https://metalogos.org/files/shroud/C14.pdf"}],"sum":"On 28 May 1898 the Italian photographer Secondo Pia was allowed to photograph a long linen cloth kept in Turin. On the cloth itself the figure is faint, a brownish shadow that is hard to make out. But on Pia's glass plate, where light and dark are reversed, a man appeared: a bearded face with closed eyes, a body laid out with the hands crossed, much clearer than on the linen. The image on the cloth behaves like a photographic negative. Pia's plates turned a relic into a scientific problem, and it has stayed one ever since.\n\nThe Shroud of Turin is a rectangle of linen about 4.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill. Along it runs the faint straw-yellow image of a naked man, front and back, the two views head to head at the middle of the cloth, a layout that analysts find compatible with a cloth wrapped around a body about 1.75 metres long. The man has a beard, a moustache and shoulder-length hair parted in the middle; experts have estimated his height at anywhere from 1.70 to 1.88 metres. Reddish-brown stains match the wounds of a crucifixion as the Gospels describe it. That is why Christians, above all Catholics, have venerated it for centuries as the burial cloth of Jesus.\n\nIts documented history begins in France in the 1350s. A knight, Geoffroi de Charny, had endowed a small collegiate church at the village of Lirey in 1353, and around 1355 its dean began to show a long cloth bearing the image of a battered body. Doubts came early. The scholar Nicole Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, cited it as a plain case of clergy faking relics to enrich their churches. In a long memorandum to the antipope Clement VII, the Bishop of Troyes, Pierre d'Arcis, called it a forgery and said that an earlier bishop had identified the artist; the memo is dated to 1389 in one place and 1390 in another. Clement allowed the canons to keep showing it as long as they said it was a representation, not a true relic.\n\nThen the cloth began to travel. Marguerite de Charny, the knight's granddaughter, took it during the Hundred Years' War, refused to give it back, and in 1453 deeded it to Louis, Duke of Savoy. She was excommunicated for it. For the Savoys it became a family palladium, a sacred guarantee of their house. In 1532 a fire in their chapel at Chambéry sent molten silver from the reliquary through the folded cloth, leaving a symmetrical pattern of burn holes that the Poor Clare nuns patched. In 1578 the dukes brought it to their new capital, Turin. In 1694 it was placed in a chapel built for it by the architect Guarino Guarini, linked to both the royal palace and the cathedral. It belonged to the House of Savoy until 1983, when the former king Umberto II left it to the Holy See. The Catholic Church today neither endorses nor rejects it as a relic of Jesus.\n\nThe test that was meant to settle the matter came on the morning of 21 April 1988, in the sacristy of Turin Cathedral. In front of the Archbishop of Turin, two textile experts, a British Museum scientist and representatives of three laboratories, a strip about 10 by 70 millimetres was cut from one corner, from a single site on the main body of the cloth away from any patches or charred areas, according to the report. Pieces went to the University of Arizona, the University of Oxford and the federal technical institute in Zurich, along with control samples of known age: linen from an eleventh- or twelfth-century Nubian tomb, mummy linen from Thebes, and threads from a medieval cope. In 1989 the three laboratories reported in Nature that the linen of the shroud dates to between AD 1260 and 1390, with at least 95 per cent confidence. Their conclusion was blunt: \"conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.\" The date matches the cloth's first appearance in the records.\n\nThe same paper contains a detail that later critics seized on. The agreement among the laboratories on the control samples was \"exceptionally good,\" but the spread of the results for the shroud itself was \"somewhat greater than would be expected\" from the stated errors. Later statistical studies agreed that the shroud data are not uniform, perhaps because of something unusual in the fabric, perhaps because of differences in cleaning. A 2020 analysis found that shifting two labs' results by just ten years would remove the problem.\n\nThe sharpest challenge came in 2005 from Raymond Rogers, a chemist at Los Alamos who had studied the fibres for years. He argued that the sampled corner was coated with a plant gum holding dye, that it \"was not part of the original cloth,\" and that the date was \"not valid\" for the shroud as a whole. From the lack of vanillin in the fibres, he estimated the cloth at between 1,300 and 3,000 years old, and he called for new dating of several fully characterised samples. Mainstream specialists disagree firmly: the radiocarbon result is accepted as valid by experts, and the medieval-repair idea, along with theories of bacterial contamination and carbon monoxide, is described as scientifically refuted. The weave points the same way. Its herringbone twill needs a treadle loom of a kind introduced to Europe only in the thirteenth century, and its yarn has a Z-twist typical of medieval Western Europe rather than the S-twist of ancient Egypt and the Levant.\n\nThe date is the strong part of the case. What remains genuinely unexplained is how the image was made. In 1978 the microscopist Walter McCrone examined tape samples and concluded the image was painted in red ochre in a gelatin medium, with vermilion for the blood; other researchers disputed him. The discoloration sits only on the topmost two or three fibres of each thread, and penetrates the outer layer of each fibre by about 200 nanometres, two ten-thousandths of a millimetre. Its darkness comes not from colour but from how many fibres are yellowed, like a halftone print. Ultraviolet studies suggest the blood was on the cloth before the image formed. Artists and scientists have reproduced parts of it with rubbings over a bas-relief, acid pigments, dust transfer and other medieval methods. Yet no method has been shown to reproduce all of its large-scale and microscopic properties at once, and the exact way a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century maker produced it is still debated.\n\nSo the shroud stands at an odd crossing. Three laboratories put its linen in the Middle Ages, and the weave agrees. But the image that has drawn millions of pilgrims remains a technique no one can fully repeat. If a medieval artisan made it, how did he produce a picture that showed its full clarity only to a camera five centuries later, and what else about how it was made have we still not understood?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NX-A47.webp","w":613,"h":766,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Shroudofturin1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}