One of the problems we have in understanding the image on the Shroud is that the better the photograph, the more the vagaries of the cloth interfere with the image itself. Attempts to “remove the weave” have been more or less successful, but invariably involve an element of subjectivity that cannot be verified for accuracy. Recently, however, Mark Rivera has derived a remarkable image which, however it was made (and I’m not sure how), can be demonstrated to be accurate. Here it is (with his permission):
What makes this image different from all the others is how it can be shown to be correct. By inverting it, and superimposing it over a negative of the Shroud, the light and dark exactly coincide, and cancel each other out. A light grey area on the original is neutralised by a dark grey area on the derivation and vice versa, and the image simply disappears. Here is the photo from which Mark made his image, and the image above inverted:
And here is the inverted image (at 50% opacity so you can see the original under it) sliding into position:
And suddenly there is no image at all, but the blood, water stains, creases, and as much of the weave as is detectable in the original (mostly horizontal and vertical banding), is retained. On the extracted image, there is no blood, water stains, creases or banding. This is as perfect as I have even seen. (I don’t want to go overboard; there are faint traces of each of each one on its opposite, but I think they are negligible.)
This is not just clever. For the first time, an assessment of some of the qualities of the image, unaffected by extraneous irregularities, can be examined.
1). The 3D effect.
A good photo of the Shroud is a mass of tiny dark and light areas, mostly due to the shadows between the threads of the cloth as they overlap, from which a reasonable 3D image is only obtainable either by reducing the resolution of the image, blurring the areas together, or increasing the smoothing of the image, which has a similar effect. If you don’t do either of those, your result is a forest of needles, through which the 3D face emerges. It is seriously distorted by the blood, creases and water stains, and more subtly affected by the lightness/darkness of the bands of weave. Mark’s image eliminates al that. Here are the two images, original and extract, both at maximum resolution (on ImageJ – “Grid size: 1204”) and minimum smoothing (“Smoothing: 0.0”).
In both these images, it is important to understand that the light and dark is not derived directly from the 2D image, but from a two-stage process which goes something like this:
1) Give each area an intensity value from 0 to 10.
2) Give each intensity value a height value from 0 to 10.
3) Give each height value an intensity value from 0 to 10.
This sounds silly, as you’re just going from an intensity of, say, 5 to a height of 5, and back to an intensity of 5, but bear with me. If we omitted stage three, so that all the height values were given the same intensity value, we’d get this:
Of course we would. In real life, the reason we see, say, a bumpy snowfield, in 3D, is not because the snow nearest to us is really a whiter white than the snow furthest away, but because of the shadows cast by the bumps when the sun shines. Anyone who has skied a mogul slope on a dull overcast day will know what I mean. It is quite difficult to distinguish the bumps. Similarly, a statue painted a uniform white can only be given three dimensions to our eyes because of the light falling on it and the shadows created. Like this bust of Pope Pius XI, and death mask of Pius IX:
Nobody painted the sides of their faces, or the crease between their lips, darker than the rest; they are shadows. Fortunately, on the featureless shape above, 3D software can add artificial illumination for us, highlighting some areas and darkening others, just as the sun gives definition to a mogul field or the faces above. Here is just such an addition, to the featureless rhombus above:
This, at last, is truly indicative of what we get by transforming the lights and darks of the image into 3D relief. Interestingly, some of the imperfections of Mark Rivera’s derivation, such as some of the horizontal and vertical banding, and the big crease below the beard, are accentuated by this artificial light, but no matter, they are very minor. A detailed examination of this image, inch by inch, is truly fascinating, but here I will pick out a few aspects I think are particularly worthy of comment.
a). A perfect 3D image of a face. Well, obviously not. I shouldn’t have to keep making this point. Look at it sideways.
b). The profile of the nose. It is sometimes noted that the nose looks as if its cartilage has been detached, the classic “broken nose.” Here it looks severely indented in several places.
The blue profile is just below the actual ridge for clarity.
c). The profile of the lower lip. This surprised me. It’s almost pointed.
d). “Circular” bumps over the eyes. Nope.
e). Swellings on the cheek. Definitely! But this tends to undermine the idea that the image on the Shroud is photographic. After a few minutes, bruises are darker, not lighter, than the surrounding, undamaged skin. If the negative image of the Shroud is a photograph, the bruises should appear darker, not lighter, than the surrounding skin, and therefore be recessed within it, not protruding from it.
2). Paint, Print, Vaporogram or Radiation.
Now lets look at what actually appears on the cloth.
Of course, as Mark was working from a black-and-white photograph, this reproduction is also black-and-white, and we can’t see if the colour of the image is qualitatively, rather than quantitively different. So we cannot tell if the image is merely due to a darkening of the colour of the background or not. If it was distinctly redder, or bluer or greener, for that matter, that would be good evidence for applied pigment, but the fact that it isn’t is not necessarily evidence against. Both degraded cellulose and some ochres are a) indistinguishable from each other and b) qualitatively distinguishable from the background colour of the Shroud. Incidentally, some areas of the image above are actually lighter than the background, which would indicate a different, lighter pigment, or some radiation that lightened rather than darkened the cellulose, but in this case I think it is just an artefact of the production process and can be ignored.
a). One possible worthwhile exercise is to compare the intensity of this image with the iron profile discovered by Morris, Schwalbe and London in Turin in 1978 (‘X-Ray Fluorescence Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ X-Ray Spectrometry, 1980 ).
Here is the diagram showing the positions from which the spectra were taken, then superimposed on the Rivera image (flipped horizontally to conform to the spectra), and surrounded by a blue bounding box.
And here is the area within the blue box, a 3D profile of that area from ImageJ, the values of iron density, in µg/cm2, derived along the strip, and a profile derived from those numbers.
The iron profile pretty well matches the intensity profile except at point 18, which Morris, Schwalbe and London explain was over a bloodstain, and of course the Rivera image does not include the blood.
b). Another interesting point is that the image of the face seems quite detached. If the base colour around the perimeter of Rivera’s picture is removed, we get this:
There’s a huge gap where there is no image below the beard. If we superimpose this on a bigger picture of the body, we see:
Actually, I think the lack of image right at the bottom of Mark’s creation may be an artefact, so I hope that before long he may use his skills to extend his image over more of the Shroud. The fingers and feet would be particularly interesting, I feel.
c). If the image on the Shroud is the result of radiation emerging from the substrate, be it body, statue or whatever, it seems that it must have been vertically collimated: all the radiation travelling upwards or downwards but not sideways. This can give us some insight into the supposed orientation of the figure below. Here are three possible orientations of the head, and rays of radiation, in vertical bars, emerging from it.
First we notice the relative distances between the features captioned, especially how bunched the chin-lip-nose-eye combination, and how the top of the head is from the nose. The further forward the tilt of the head, the more of the head is able to radiate vertically upwards.
The Shroud’s features look like this:
To my mind, this eliminates the “head-tipped-forward” attitude, as seen on the left of the three heads above, as a possible attitude for a body under the cloth. If it be claimed that instead of lying horizontal, the cloth followed the contours of the body, the distance between the nose and top of the head becomes even greater. Here is the latest “hyper-realistic” model derived from the Shroud and a schematic cloth draped over it. The eye-top length is even greater than it would be if the cloth were horizontal.
Then consider the aspect of whom we are looking at:
Not down from above, almost losing the moustache under the nose, or up from below, looking at the nostrils, just straight on. This man is lying flat.
d) A few people think that the Shroud image is a photograph in the more or less conventional sense of the word, an image derived from light reflecting off the body, and that the light emanates from a source. Both T.C. Newman (‘Follow the Light’) and Gilbert Lavoie (‘The Shroud of Jesus: And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed’) think the light shone obliquely from around head level, producing shadows under the eyebrows, nose, pectoral muscles, arms, and so on.
If the image is a print, we would not expect any shadows at all, light and dark being entirely due to the intensity of what came off the block, but if a sketch, then an artist would certainly think in terms of light. If radiated, then there would also be no shadows, but light and dark would be entirely in terms of the distance the radiation travelled between substrate and cloth. It is part of the enduring mystery of the Shroud that the different interpretations can all produce a similar image.
Why, thank you, Sir.
Absolutely fascinating.