Giulio Fanti replies

I have a lot of respect for Giulio Fanti. He has been working at minute traces from the Shroud, some from Ray Rogers’s sticky tapes and some from the hooverings of Giovanni Riggi between the Shroud and its backing cloth, for many years, and has published his findings in numerous papers and a couple of books. He also has an extensive collection of Byzantine coins, which he thinks are too similar to the Shroud to have been produced independently of it.

Unfortunately, he ‘suffers’ from absolute certainty that the Shroud is authentic based on personal revelation, and the trouble with that is that such unshakable conviction is a serious obstacle to scientific objectivity, however hard you try not to let it influence you. It leads you to think that any findings tending to support your conviction must be right, and anything tending to refute it must be wrong, without being able to acknowledge any doubt, because there isn’t any.

Much of his recent work has focussed on particles of alleged blood, which has been criticised by people rather more qualified to speak about microcytes and aspergillus spores than I. I cannot tell whether he or they are correct, but the very fact that two differing views have been expressed means that there is scientific doubt about Fanti’s conclusions – a doubt which can only be dispelled by more research, not by a firmer statement of conviction.

His views being so, he must be commended for agreeing to review my attempt to demonstrate how the Shroud image may have been made in the 14th century, when he knew for a fact that it couldn’t have been.¹ I responded to his review in my own blog,² and he has included a ‘response to my response’ in a further article,³ although most of it is dedicated to critics of his blood findings, on which I have said almost nothing.

He begins the section on me by resenting my comment, re-iterated above, that absolute conviction is not conducive to impartial judgement, because it “misrepresents his scientific rigor and objectivity.” I don’t agree. I have no doubt that Giulio’s experimental work is scrupulously honest, or that he does his best to be objective under the excruciating certainly that I must be wrong before even taking the lens cover off his microscope, but it is extremely difficult, and occasionally his impatience clouds his judgement, as we shall see.

He begins saying that my blogpost “claims to be able to reproduce the body image of the TS using a modified technique by him, which was initially proposed by Emily Craig.” But of course I don’t. My concluding remarks are:

“Now, what are we to make of all this? The first conclusion I draw is that we really don’t know enough about the microscopy of the Shroud fibres to be able to make any genuine comparison, at a microscopic level, between any experiment and the Shroud. The second is that in the absence of any precise description, these experiments seem to me as close as I am likely to come.
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At the end of it all, Fanti is quite correct to conclude that I have not reproduced the Shroud image, but I don’t agree that his analysis has shown ‘how far this result is from the actual production of a copy of the most important Relic of Christianity.’ I think it’s come quite close.”

But Fanti’s all-or-nothing attitude continues: “Only one piece of evidence is sufficient to invalidate the whole hypothesis presented. However, the author of [my blog] is skilled at confusing ideas by mixing many collateral topics of minor importance with the justification of clarifying for the reader, who is also called to judge the information presented in a sometimes-misleading way.”

Firstly, sure, a jigsaw with even one piece missing is not a completed jigsaw, but it might be nearly so, and that’s all I claimed. Secondly, what were these “collateral topics of minor importance”? I simply fitted my experiment to Fanti’s list of 12 criteria for acceptance, and he didn’t say which of them were “collateral topics of minor importance”.” and which were not.

An example of certainty clouding impartiality occurs in the next paragraph: “For example, to sustain the similarity of the experiment with the TS fibers, that author compares a micrograph of linen fibers from his experiment, rich in additional colored particles, with a TS fiber not of pure image, but a bloody fiber photographed by Eugenia Nitowski (without clarifying that this particle was taken from a bloodstain) asserting that both contain additional particles (red blood cells in the case of the TS fiber).” Well, the reason I didn’t clarify that the Nitowski particle was taken from a bloodstain is because it wasn’t. It is photo 349, from slide 3BF, which was taken from a non-image area between the fingers of the right hand and the nearby scorch-line. Why does Fanti think it is from a bloodstain? Because it looks like a bloodstain! This is circular reasoning.

At this point Fanti feels the need to quote a comment about me from a blog: “(He) knows it’s the real deal. Otherwise, it would make zero sense that he would be literally dedicating his life to prove it otherwise. He’s a snake in the grass as you well know. Pray for him.” Why? Does Fanti’s egregious quoting enhance his reputation for “scientific rigor and objectivity,” or does it tend to diminish it?

From here on the article gets muddled, and it were tedious to unravel every tangled thread, so let’s just take a few. The first of his twelve criteria is “E1. The body image has the normal tones of light and dark reversed so the body parts nearer the cloth are darker. This fact leads us to state that the body image appears as a photographic negative.” But when I point out that the hair and beard were dark in life and appear dark on the Shroud, unlike a photographic negative, Fanti says that I am: “forgetting that the TS body image did not encode the color of the hair but only the intensity with which the probable radiation emitted by the human body imprinted the body image.” That’s not what a photographic negative is. The fact is that Fanti’s Criterion 1 is contradictory to his Criterion 2, and this is true however many “scholars” have endorsed them.

And so it goes. He confuses fibres with threads, says that he both did and didn’t ask for samples to be sent, admits that he knew they’d be duds anyway, and wonders why I “disparage the work of numerous scholars” and “disseminate so many falsehoods.” I think it should be perfectly clear why I choose to point out the flaws in allegedly scholarly articles, and if anyone thinks I have disseminated any falsehoods at all, they have yet to point them out.

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1 ‘Turin Shroud: Comprehensive Impossibility for a Work of Art,’ Giulio Fanti, Medical & Clinical Case Reports Journal, 2025

2 ‘How was it done?’ Hugh Farey, themedievalshroud.com

3 ‘Turin Shroud: Example of Claims against its Authenticity and Comments,’ Giulio Fanti and Carol Gregorek, Medical & Clinical Case Reports Journal, 2025