A succession of ‘suggestions’ ‘in which I might be interested’ by academia.edu, cluttering up my inbox, has recently focussed my attention on the fact that much serious, not to mention intense, Shroud debate is not in English, and as such is largely ignored by those to whom French, Spanish and especially Italian is not easily accessible.
I have made some attempt to make Paul Vignon’s hypothesis about the Shroud’s influence on Byzantine iconography better known, but it has largely been met with incredulity. His idea, that the image on the Shroud affected depictions not only of Christ, but of hundreds of sacred figures – apostles, saints and clerics – and even some emperors and their attendants, is explained in minute and profusely illustrated detail in his ‘Le Saint Suaire de Turin, devant la Science, l’Archéologie, l’Histoire, l’Iconographie, la Logique‘, published in 1939. However, unlike his earlier book on the Shroud, from 1902, it has never been translated into English. Sindonological understanding of his ideas has derived almost entirely from a much re-interpreted paraphrase included in Edward Wuenschel’s ‘Self-Portrait of Christ’ (1954) which shrivels Vignon wider applications of the marks on Shroud to concentrate almost entirely on Jesus himself. It distinguishes and enumerates Vignon’s more generalised observations into a specific list of ‘markings’, and even includes a few extras which are not even mentioned in the original.
Another well worthwhile pursuit is the long-running discussion – perhaps spat would be the better word – between Andrea Nicolotti, Emanuela Marinelli and Gian Marco Rinaldi. Nicolotti’s first book on the Templar connection (I Templari e la Sindone, Storia di un Falso, Salerno Ed., 2011) is not available in English at all, and his subsequent works are rather expensive in translation (From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin: The Metamorphosis and Manipulation of a Legend, Brill, 2014, and the soon-to-be-published The Shroud of Turin: the History and Legends of the World’s Most Famous Relic, Baylor University Press, 2020), but Marielli has produced some robust responses. As these have been published in English, many sindonologists have only obtained a rather one-sided impression of the debate. Two are in the Newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud (Wiping the Slate Clean, Issue 74, 2011, and A Small Cloth to be Destroyed, Issue 75, 2012), and a more serious investigations into the Image of Edessa is at shroud.com. (The Shroud and the Iconography of Christ, 2014).
Marinelli has written her own books on the Shroud, La Sindone. Testimone di una Presenza (San Paolo, 2010), and La Sindone. Storia e Misteri (Odoya, 2017), both of which have been criticised in their turn, but again the debate is only in Italian.
One response is by Gian-Marco Rinaldi, published at academia.edu (Quando le mele cadevano all’insù, 2010). It starts like this (my translation):
When Apples Fell Upwards: Universal Gravitation According to Emanuela Marinelli (and Andrea Tornielli)
Sindonologists often draw up lists of reasons explaining why a medieval forger could not have manufactured the Turin Shroud. Not one is valid, and several are ludicrous. If I were to award the Palme d’Or to the most grotesque, I would choose one suggested by the sindonologist Emanuela Marinelli, according to which a forger could not have painted the rivulets of blood on the figure of Christ because in the Middle Ages Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation was not yet known.
A more general assault, also by Gian-Marco Rinaldi, is Le Fonti di Emanuela Marinelli per il Tessuto della Sindone (academia.edu, 2018). It begins (my translation):
Emanuela Marinelli’s Sources for the Fabric of the Shroud
In Emanuela Marinelli’s writings on the Shroud, various statements regarding the characteristics of the cloth of the Shroud are made in such a way that its authenticity appears confirmed. These statements are often ambiguous, misleading or inaccurate and sometimes simply false.
Strong stuff, but to discover the truth of any of it requires a knowledge of Italian or a determined assault on Google Translate.
The latest recommendation from academia.edu was a paper by Sania Gukova entitled Il Volto Santo nell’Iconografia dell’Oriente Cristiano (‘The Holy Face in the Iconography of the Christian East’), from 2007. Gukova was the editor of a book called Icone: Mistero del Volto di Cristo (‘Icon: The Mystery of the Face of Christ’), which was published in Turin, and included an essay by Giuseppe Ghiberti on the Shroud. Gukova’s own essay is an exploration of numerous iconographical types from Byzantine depictions of Christ, including the Images of Edessa (and the Keramion associated with it) and Camuliana, the Faces of Veronica, Epitaphioi, and their association with the relics of the burial cloths of Jesus.
New to me is Gukova’s suggestion that interest in the shroud of Christ as a relic stemmed from earlier liturgical uses of various veils or covers, particularly the corporal, which in wrapping the body and blood of the mass, symbolised the wrapping of Christ in the tomb. In the Eastern church this developed from the small square aer into the huge epitaphios entirely by liturgical development.
Like almost every other Byzantine art historian, Gukova does not accept the hypothesis that the Image of Edessa could be the folded Shroud. The inconsistency of the origin story and the artwork, and the frequent reference in eye-witness accounts to both the Image and the burial cloths as separate items at the same time, all militate far more strongly against the hypothesis than any alleged similarity can support it.
Having said that, Gukova does not go into the origin of the shroud relics, or even whether they had images on them, presumably because of the lack of any evidence on the topic. Of which we cannot speak, on that we must stay silent.
Edited some days later! Having looked at a couple of Italian papers on academia.edu, I have continued to be notified of numerous further papers that “might be of interest” to me. I mentioned earlier the ongoing squabble between Andrea Nicolotti and Emanuela Marinelli, but I’ve now been made aware of another of these tit-for-tat sparring matches between Nicolotti and Barbara Frale. The latter is a renowned Vatican researcher, and achieved prominence by discovering an authentic copy of the so-called Chinon Parchment, a medieval document showing that Pope Clement V tried (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to rescue the Templars from utter oblivion under king Philip IV of France by refusing to declare them heretical.
However, this discovery inspired Frale to go deeper into Templar rituals, reading a great deal more into the evidence than it merited, and deciding that they were once in possession of the Shroud, between its capture from Constantinople and its reappearance at Lirey. This hypothesis is not without support, but her next ‘discovery’, the complete text of Jesus’s death certificate in broken fragments scattered around the Shroud, was too far-fetched (not to mention lacking in discernible evidence) for credibility among most Shroud scholars, and has since discredited her as a serious researcher in this field. All this has been splendid grist to Nicolotti’s mill, and resulted in successive papers repudiating all her discoveries.
Another, perhaps more interesting, paper by Nicolotti, is Il Processo Negato. Un Inedito Parere della Santa Sede sull’Autenticità della Sindone (Case Dismissed. An Unpublished Opinion of the Holy See on the Authenticity of the Shroud). It concerns a formal attempt to have Ulysse Chevalier denounced by the Holy Office (successor to the Inquisition) because of his promotion of the non-authenticity of the Shroud. According to Nicolotti, following various papers discovered in the Vatican Archives and other repositories, proceedings were instigated, and the Monsignor and his case for a medieval origin of the Shroud thoroughly investigated. Rather surprisingly, the findings of the court were that Chevalier was fully justified in his opinions, and the pope, Leo XIII, seemed to agree with him in the words “non sustinetur.” Chevalier was acquitted, but the whole process was quietly suppressed so as not to upset the sensibilities of the House of Savoy, particularly in the person of the owner of the Shroud, the King of Italy.