Shroud of Turin part 3

Part 3

 

And it seemed so scientific, so very rational and objective too. What a sting. A perfect set-up. We were all the intended marks in a worldwide scam, or else we were the victims of some cretinous bad joke.

 

There is only one word for the kind of imbecility that wraps up its moronic nakedness in the trappings of logic and science. Such twaddle is not properly to be called by any cheap, one syllable, derogatory four letter word, no no no. Perpetrated by scientists as only scientists themselves could possibly do it: it is indeed chemically pure, genuine, effervescent sparkling Pseudo science! With a capital P, it is of the highest order, fashioned by experts, sanctioned by professionals. With a nihil obstat from bishops of this day, all it lacks is an imprimatur from the Pope.

 

The most celebrated act in this paper charade is the image analysis done by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the Air Force Weapons Test Site in Los Alamos National Laboratory near Albuquerque New Mexico. Scientists there used high quality photographic negatives bearing the image of the Shroud. But this analysis does not in any way show a three dimensional likeness of Christ derived from the Shroud as claimed by STURP. It shows an image of the human model they used to trick the computer image analyzer into interpreting the fuzzy outlines of the "man" in the Shroud as if they came from a 3-D statuesque source. In other words, they implicitly assumed what they were purportedly trying to prove when they calibrated the image analyzer. You can't get a much smaller radius into a circular argument, except maybe by supercomputer.

 

STURP supposed that if the Shroud contained 3-D image information that could be used to regenerate a sort of cathode ray sculpture or electronic BAS-relief of a human form, then that would be proof that the image could not be the work of a minor artist. No such artist, the argument goes, would be able to supply the precise mathematical information "inherent" in the Shroud so as to produce such a striking effect, especially no artist who worked in 14th century ignorance.

 

This is a pronouncement of a well known art critic that had been domesticated by STURP and who had encouraged the project from the start. The reputations of more professional people than just the scientists involved with STURP are on the line here.

Even with the kind of computer enhancement that underlay the digital 3-D output from JPL's unique sophisticated technology, the likeness derived from the Shroud is crude at best. The late artist Walter Sanford has produced images strikingly similar to that on the Shroud by means of a conventional art technique. Belying STURP's claim that no artist could have done it, Mr. Sanford demonstrated to a packed Chicago audience in 1984 that the job is so simple that even a provincial ignoramus from the 14th century could easily have finished the creation in a matter of minutes. After all, the utterly impossible task that such a peasant artisan would have had to do to get the details almost right was to be able to read some version of a bootlegged Bible.

 

Painting rapidly, as an artist would have approached a fresco, Sanford swabbed a large piece of linen mounted like canvas on a frame. The broad strokes and large brush he used produced very distinct eyes, nose, hair and other facial features in exactly the same diffuse manner as the Shroud. This was largely due to his skill, of course, and to the fact that he used a "dry brush" that was only damp, not soaking wet, with the extremely dilute iron earth tempera that the Shroud artist would have had to use.

 

Due to the moisture on the linen, the painting remained manifestly perceptible to the audience and to the artist for many minutes. This was long enough for him to touch-up and add some minute detail. When it dried, the image had the same ethereal, almost invisible quality of the Shroud. The viewer had to stand back quite a distance to perceive it and he also had to avoid looking directly at the feature that he wanted to see. If there were edges in the image painted this way, they were extremely dispersed and impossible to exactly pinpoint by eye.

 

What the artist had to keep in mind while producing a Shroud image was that he was in essence making a sort of ersatz contact print or rubbing. Children try rubbings all the time when they press a green leaf from a pretty tree under a piece of paper then wipe a crayon sideways across the sheet. An image of the leaf appears where the raised veins cause the paper to catch the pigment. Only the raised parts contribute to the image. 

Art students sometimes do this with sculptures that can be spared. Graphite or charcoal is used to coat the piece and then paper is smoothed over it. An image gets transferred to the paper, roughly duplicating the intentions of the sculptor in two dimensions. But the product of a rubbing is not a mathematical projection of the sculpted form onto a 2-D plane as the Shroud image seems to be. A true rubbing necessarily rolls the paper around the object, producing an odd but distinctive cylindrical distortion when the paper in unrolled.

But a genuine projected effect is automatic when an artist naively attempts to simulate a rubbing by free hand painting using a dry brush and very dilute tempera. The idea was to mimic dirty, bloody sweat that was to have "rubbed off" on the Shroud while Christ's body was wrapped in it. Mr. Sanford was a good artist but all he did was attempt to manually replicate what children and art students do mechanically all the time.

By the way, all the other "unique" characteristics of the Shroud are reproduced by this method.

A major problem with the Jet Propulsion Lab team's image analysis effort was that they selected control images or comparison paintings that they knew before hand could not behave like the Shroud does when photographed. These were contrast enhanced photographic negative images, not positive prints. When the image analyzer was applied to the "controls" a Shroud-like smoothly varying simulated 3-D effect was not produced. The Shroud seemed to be unique; unique among the tightly limited standards of comparison that JPL scientists allowed, that is. This falsely reinforced the claim that it was not a painting.

STURP had faith but not felicity. Someday this miscarriage of science will be seen for the travesty that it is. STURP & The Shroud will be synonymous with Piltdown and Lysenko.