How was it done?

Ah, the £64,000 dollar question. According to Pierre d’Arcis, the Shroud was a “pannum artificiose depictum […] in quo subtili modo depicta erat duplex effigies unius hominis” (“a cloth skillfully illustrated on which rather subtly are depicted double images of one man”),¹ while Cornelius Zantfleit called it a “linteum, in quo egregie miro artificio depicta fuerat forma corporis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, cum omnibus lineamentis singulorum membrorum” (“a sheet on which, with extraordinarily wonderful craftsmanship, has been depicted the form of the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, with all the details of each limb”).² According to John Heller’s famous press release, “No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils. X-ray, fluorescence and microchemistry on the fibrils preclude the possibility of paint being used as a method for creating the image,”³ which sounds quite definitive, although Schwalbe and Rogers were a little more circumspect: “No pigment particles can be resolved at 50X magnification in image areas. The image does not look like a painting by direct microscopic examination.”⁴ Walter McCrone “established the presence of Fe₂O₃.xH₂O and HgS corresponding to two common artist’s pigments of the 14th century, red ochre and vermilion, with a collagen (gelatin) tempera binder. […] The red particles require careful high-magnification light microscopy (600-1000X) to see and identify.”^5,6

The truth is that the Shroud has not been sufficiently well examined for a definitive description of the image making method to be derived. Far from being the most studied artefact of all time, all we actually have is a handful of photographs, a few spectroscopic analyses and some sticky tape slides, achieved by pressing tape so weakly onto the cloth that scarcely more than adventitious debris was removed. The fibres adhering were then so thoroughly cleaned in the process of extracting them from the adhesive that it comes as no surprise that almost nothing was discovered on them. Sadly, records of the man who originally created the the image, which were collected by Bishop Henri de Poitiers in the late 1350s and prepared as evidence by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis around 1390, are no longer in evidence.

Anybody wishing to demonstrate to authenticists a method by which the Shroud image may have been formed comes up against a formidable barricade of obfuscation, which has to be dispersed before sensible progress can be made. The real objection is not practical but an article of faith, of which all the practical considerations are mere corroborations. Their only purpose is to justify the impregnable claim that “the image cannot be manmade,” which should be silently appended to each like the response to a litany.

℣ The image has no outline…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.
℣ The image has no brushstrokes…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.
℣ The image does not penetrate the fabric…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.
℣ The image does not penetrate the threads…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.
℣ The threads are not cemented together…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.
℣ There is no sign of capillarity…
℟ So it cannot be manmade.

And so on. The verses are not really fundamental to the dogma, so refuting them does little to dispel true authenticist faith. Most are irrelevant, but some of them are fair descriptions of the image, and should be take into consideration by serious researchers.

It has long been my view that the image is some kind of impression, such as might be obtained from a bas relief, so here is a preliminary trial:

Here is a bas relief, and an impression of it made by dabbing paint on with a dampened cloth; in one swift process demonstrating that artificial images do not necessarily have outlines or brush strokes, nor penetrate the fabric. Why, we must wonder, did anybody think they did? Here are the backs of a couple of famous paintings…

(left) Diana and her Dog / Sebastio Ricci, (right) Composition No. IV / Piet Mondrian

And here are the “negative” and “3D” images just to complete the set.

Note the rather battered appearance of the actually smoothly rounded surface of the apple. It very much puts me in mind of the rather battered appearance of the actually smoothy rounded surface of the forehead of the man in the Shroud.

The next of the classic canards is that the image “does not penetrate the threads,” by which it is usually supposed that only the surface fibres – to a depth of two or three – of each thread carry the discolouration of the image, the rest remaining prisitine. The evidence for this is miserably lacking; some say it was discovered by the picking away of surface fibres in 1978, or by simple direct observation. Schwalbe and Rogers say “Microscopic studies have revealed the image to be highly superficial; the image resides in the topmost fibers of the woven material as a translucent yellow discoloration,”⁷ but this could only have been ascertained by examining whole threads, not the scanty fibres extracted by the sticky tape. What surprises us though, is why this superficiality should be considered evidence against an artificial image. In 1973, the first scientific commission to study the Shroud in detail noticed that, when an extracted thread inadvertently broke, “with a slight amount of fraying, it could be observed that the reddish tint of the thread was limited to the surface, while the inside appeared to be perfectly white.”⁸ If even blood, runny enough to squeeze through the interstices of the threads and appear on the back of the cloth, did not penetrate the threads, then more viscous paint, which does not appear on the back, is unlikely to have done so either.

Anyway, to test how likely or not this phenomenon might be, I liberally soaked a piece of cloth, about 2cm wide, in paint, then rolled it into a cylinder, and cut a thin slice from the middle.

Looking down through a microscope, it is clear that even when thoroughly painted on both sides, the paint does not seep more than a few fibres into each thread – just as, we are told, on the Shroud.

(About 4.5mm across)

And while we’re about it, the fibres are not cemented together, and there is no sign of capillarity (whatever that means), but we’ll have to look more closely at the threads to demonstrate that, so it will be discussed below.

Now let’s look at the remarkably conflicting claims of John Heller and Walter McCrone on pigment, and see whether Schwalbe and Rogers go any way to resolve them. Here are images of a sticky tape slide of heavily pigmented linen (with yellow ochre) fibres at different magnifications, and it is perhaps true that it would be difficult to identify pigment, as opposed to adventitious debris, at X50.

Apart from not being easily able to discern particles until high magnifications, there is no sign of cementation or capillarity. This is not at all surprising. The “cement” used to hold pigment particles to their substrate is egg-yolk mixed with up to five times as much water, depending on how viscous the craftsman wanted his paint to be, not a heavy glue such as evaporating oil, which might well appear to hold the fibres together. “Capillarity” is the propensity of liquids to be drawn along narrow grooves in a substrate by intramolecular rather than gravitational forces, and can be seen on Mark Evans’s photos of the Shroud, as will be shown below.

Here are a some photos of fibres from the Shroud image, from Walter McCrone and Eugenia Nitowski.

Top two: McCrone: The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist’s Pigment
Bottom two: Eugenia Nitowski (private collection)

A significant feature of most low power photos of Shroud slides is the debris field, as well as what appears to be particles adherent to the fibres, which is best resolved at higher magnifications. It is unfortunate that such was the acrimony between Heller and McCrone that the former was led to attempt to win the field by his misleading press release, which has dominated authenticist dogma since. In their own paper on the subject, Heller and Adler identified red particulates from submicron to 3µm in size, the smaller, to about 1µm, being identified as iron oxide. They even saturated some control cloth in 1µm iron oxide particles – 0.1% Fe₂O₃ suspended in “sonerated” 0.1% gelatin – and achieved: “Fe₂O₃ particles frequently clumped as well as adherent to fibrils, resembles birefringent red particulate Shroud fibrils more closely than the non-birefringent red coated fibrils under phase contrast; no internal particles seen in the lumen of the fibrils.”⁹ This is as close a description of McCrone’s own observation as to be almost indistinguishable.

A more sensible question, and one worthy of serious consideration, is whether there is enough pigment to make a visible image. The amount of iron estimated on the nose by Morris, Schwalbe and London was about 17µg/cm², which converts to about 24µg/cm² of red ochre.¹⁰ As investigated in a previous article, this is very easily visible on a white background. On the other hand, the same authors also estimated more than twice as much iron on an unimaged area, to the side of the “heel dribble,” which, if it were all part of red ochre, would be seen as a very obvious red patch. The iron in that area must be accounted for by some other chemical compound. When I repeated my experiments with yellow ochre instead of red, for example, I found that 24µg/cm² was not distinguishable from unmarked cloth. In his first published paper, before his position became both entrenched and intractable, McCrone himself decided that “we now believe that the image is made up of uniformly stained fibres plus an iron oxide pigment. The latter may have been added to form the image or to enhance an earlier uniform yellow stain.”¹¹ He later changed his mind about this more than once, but in his last paper, in Accounts of Chemical Research, says: “Microscopically the image consists of yellow fibres and red particles; the red particles are more abundant in the red blood images, and the yellow fibres are the major coloured substance in the body image.”¹²

From this point of view, the nature and quantity of the pigment is not really relevant to the actual image, which seems to be made more of “yellowed” fibre than of superficial granules. To this we now turn. McCrone decided it was due to a collagen tempera medium, Heller and Adler saw only dehydrated cellulose, and I think a number of alternatives are also possible, from an iron stain such as ferrous sulphate or acetate to tannins involving oak bark or galls. Medieval workshops were cornucopiae of both well tested and experimental dyes and “steyns,” and numerous recipes have come down to us.

In the absence of any thorough analysis of the image as a whole, or at least as a coloured area on a textile rather than fragments of fibres seen through a microscope, it seems futile to be too precise about the constitution, viscosity and application of whatever originally determined the image, especially allowing for the possibility that it may not now look much as it did seven hundred years ago. The best we can do is examine Mark Evans’s photos, which at least show short lengths of whole threads. Giulio Fanti, for example, studying a photo from the foot, sees the image as a composite of coloured and uncoloured fibres, the colour on any particular fibre varying in intensity along its length, sometimes ending abruptly.¹³

Note that the discolouration follows the fibres along the threads, which is exactly what capillary action might be expected to produce. My own analysis, of another of Evans’s photos, shows that both the colour and intensity of the image varies distinctly, if not very greatly, both along and across the threads.

Attempts to examine the fibres more closely are not necessarily more instructive. By the time Slide 3AF (from the fingers of the right hand) arrived at Eugenia Nitowski to be photographed, it looked like this:

Here are some photos of the fibres, X100:

The only other photos of “image fibres” are by Giulio Fanti. These are from Microscopic and Macroscopic Characteristics of the Shroud of Turin Image Superficiality, Slide 1EB, the back of the calf, and illustrate certain features that can be found under some conditions:

At the top (Fanti’s Figure 9.C), he points out where the Primary Cell Wall is rucked and folded over itself, so the the colour it carries appears more intense (features 1, 3 and 4), and, demonstrating that the colour is restricted to the Primary Cell Wall, as the inside of the fibre appears colourless where the PCW has been broken and stripped away (feature 2). At the bottom (Fanti’s Figure 13), he shows how the colour of any particular fibre can fade from “image colour” to “non-image colour” along the length of a fibre.

At this point I think it sensible to inquire into what is meant by “uniformity” which some people think describes the Shroud image, without, usually, being able clearly to explain what the term might mean. It has been thought, for example, that the fibres of the image were dichotomously either “coloured” or “uncoloured” and that all the coloured fibres were identical and all the uncoloured fibres were identical. The apparent variation in intensity, then, was simply a question of the proportion of coloured to uncoloured fibres in any particular area.

Another possible way of producing variation would be if all the fibres in a particular area were coloured, with the colour itself varying in intensity.

The truth, of course, as can be seen from the Mark Evans photos, is a mixture of the two, with variations along the fibres as well.

Finally, the last major claim of the miraculists is that “there is no image under the blood.” This has become such an ingrained fact that in a recent podcast Mark Guscin rather lost interest in any possibility that the image might be artificial simply because neither Luigi Garlaschelli, nor myself, thought that this fact is at all established, while he thought that no artificial explanation is possible without it.

In their Chemical Investigation paper, Heller and Adler classify the fibres they observed into seven categories, including “very pale” (backing cloth and patches), to “pale yellow” (non-image areas), “yellow” (image), and “golden yellow” (found at blood margins). I’m afraid I think these are largely unreal. Observation of any of Mark Evans’s micrographs shows that there is a continuum of colour from pale to dark along and between fibres all over the Shroud, and no evidence at all of any distinct “blood margin.”

In addition, Heller and Adler find “red coated” fibres, found in blood areas. We are perhaps to imagine either that when the blood was applied a layer of serum covered the fibres, itself covered, but not quite to the same extent, by a layer of blood, or that the blood and serum separated, so that the blood fibres were covered just in blood, while the serum alone covered the fibres surrounding them. Neither of these is evidenced by actual observation. Blood fibres, in particular, are not “red coated” at all; they are more or less uncoloured, but dotted with adherent clumps of red particles.

It is in this light that we need to read what Heller and Adler say in their Chemical Investigation paper: “One further direct and specific test was carried out for proteins namely the effect of proteolytic enzymes. For these purposes a fresh concentrated mixture of trypsin, chymotrypsin. carboxypeptidase and lysozyme in pH 8.4 buffer was employed. Within a half hour this solution completely “dissolved” the non-birefrigent red particulate coated fibril coatings, leaving no particulate residues. This further indicates that these particulates are blood and not Fe₂O₃ impregnated protein binder. This protease treatment also removes the golden yellow coating from the golden yellow fibrils, corroborating their identification as “‘serum” coated fibrils. Interestingly. fibrils freed of their coatings using this technique closely resemble the non-image fibrils when viewed under phase contrast. […] Proteases had absolutely no effect on the yellow (body) image or pale yellow non-image fibrils of the Shroud.”¹⁴

Adler restated this in slightly different terms twenty years later in an article at Shroud.com:

“Sticky tape non-image, image, and serum coated fibers were extracted from the tapes, cleaned, and characterized as in previous studies and tested along with a number of fibers from the radiocarbon threads employed in the FTIR studies. The protease was only active against the serum coated fibers and as in the previous study revealed smooth, non-corroded fiber surfaces indicating that the blood images went onto the cloth before the image forming process and protected the underlying cloth.”¹⁵

Against this we have the observation of Eugenia Nitowski:
“Alan Adler photographed the surface of Shroud image fibers and noted that they appeared corroded. This was not reported, to my knowledge, by anyone else, however, on my own Jerusalem Test Cloth 4, I found image fibers to be corroded, but I never observed this on Shroud fibers.“¹⁶
(Bolding mine)

In the papers he left on his death, now published as The Orphaned Manuscript, it is clear that Adler had come to a view regarding the image that is so different from what anybody can observe that he was clearly not only not impartial, but so invested in authenticity as to misremember his own observations. In the chapter called ‘The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin,’ he says [italics mine]:
“The image only goes one fiber deep [he had no way of knowing this, and it isn’t true], lying on top of the crowns of the threads of the weaves [no; as we can see from the Mark Evans photos, the image dips deep into the interstices between the threads] (unlike the blood images which do penetrate the cloth as they are an “applied” material). The fibers are not cemented together (no binders present) [there is no reason why a thin binder such as tempera should show such cementation], but the image process shows no signs of capillarity [yes, it does; it preferentially lies along fibres, rather than across them, and flows deep into the crevices as noted above], i.e. the image does not appear under any crossing fibres [he had no way of knowing this] and the image fibres are very brittle and show “corroded” surfaces (as would be expected for dehydratively oxidised material). All the colored fibers are uniformly colored, i.e. an exposed fibre is either colored or not colored [this is not true]. This demonstrates that the image seen at the macroscopic level is an areal density image and not a pigment concentration image. Shading is not accomplished by varying the color, but by varying the number of coloured fibres per unit area at the microlevel. [This too, is clearly untrue: see below].”¹⁷

Mark Evans’s photos of the eye (left) and the foot (right)

Claiming that the coloured fibres on the right are not darker than those on the left is clearly absurd.

Anyway, abundant experiment suggests to me that the base for the stain could be iron acetate, a simple concoction made of rusty iron and vinegar, which can end up various shades of yellow-brown, and even when filtered, tends to contain suspended iron oxide particles. Soaking oak-bark (or crushed galls) in water also produces a brown stain, but combining the two results in the very black ink popular throughout the middle ages, but the wrong colour for the Shroud.¹⁸

So here we go. After all this preamble, I reach the kernel of this paper, as it were, which was a response to a request from Giulio Fanti that I actually send him some of my experiments for review. While I was not confident that they would be examined with a wholly impartial eye, I didn’t think I had anything to lose, and sent him these:

I thought it worthwhile to send some experiments printed on my rather precious Shroud facsimile cloth, so instead of using my large “apple and grapes” bas relief (above), I used a much smaller brass dragon, about 10cm x 10cm (below), as my substrate.

Both samples were prepared identically. As described to Fanti,¹⁹ “The ‘recipe’ for the tempera began with 1 egg yolk, 50cm³ water, 50cm³ malt vinegar stirred together. Then 5ml of this mixture was added to 0.5g of yellow ochre to make the ‘paint.’
The fabric was stretched over the bas relief and taped down, and a pad of folded linen was first dipped in the ‘paint,’ and then dabbed on a piece of scrap material until only a small amount was transferred, and then dabbed on the sample piece, building up the image.”

The difference between the two is as follows, “After it was dry, one sample was lightly washed to remove surface debris, and the other washed and scrubbed with a toothbrush to remove as much pigment as possible. Both samples were then ironed to remove creases.”

The first thing to note is that both my samples show a certain amount of seepage through to the back. As can be seen, the paint was applied quite thickly, and perhaps a rather lighter hand would be required to get both a more discriminatory image on the front side, and also less seepage through to the back. If there is any image on the back side of the Shroud, it is extremely indistinct.

Next, let’s have a look at the ‘negative’ and ‘3D’ manipulations.

The unscrubbed version seems reasonably good, but the scrubbed version is much less impressive. This suggests that the pigment to medium ratio was too high, or that insufficient time has elapsed for the staining effect of the medium to take effect. Again, ever the optimist, I see these as pointers to future improvement rather than total failure.

A critical factor, it seems to me, is whether the ‘image’ fibres are distinguishable from ‘non-image’ fibres even in the absence of pigment. We will come to this in due time, as we examine Giulio Fanti’s analysis of the samples I sent. His paper, published barely a month after he received the samples and three days after being “received” by the publisher, is ten pages long, of which barely two consider the samples he was sent.²⁰ There’s a page and half listing 42 references, of which he is the sole or co-author of 22, and the first half dozen pages are devoted to explaining, in detail, why the Shroud must be authentic, and so therefore, no artificial means of production can be correct. This typifies Fanti’s position in many of his papers on the Shroud, and, in spite of his credentials as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, it casts doubt on the probability of an impartial assessment of the evidence. However committed a scientist may be to a particular point of view, he does not champion it as infallible when he critiques a challenge to it. You can deny, but you do not easily refute a counter-argument to anything by starting with the statement that it’s wrong. Fanti’s principal attitude, as expressed here and elsewhere, is that any attempt to model Shroud image formation must be a failure because the Shroud is authentic, and as I say, he devotes well over half his paper to establish authenticity first, without considering the samples at all.

In order to try to demonstrate some of the features of my samples, I will use another little sample, this one quite heavily stained so as to make the characteristics clearer under a microscope. Here is the sample (about 6cm x 4cm), two warp threads extracted from the lower edge, half stained and half not, and one of those threads teased apart so that we can look at individual fibres from each section.

When Fanti finally gets round to it, he defines a list of 12 criteria against which the samples are to be judged, which are themselves more dependent on a conviction of authenticity than they are of observation. Here they are, with his comments in green and mine in blue.

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.

E1 (reversed tones) and E2 (3D) can be accepted.

Fanti accepts that the “negative” effect of my experiments compares adequately to the Shroud, for which I am thankful, but his statement is incorrect. On the Shroud, the nose is darker than the cheeks, and the torso varies in shade from top to bottom and from side to side. If this is a reversal of the “normal tones,” then normal people have lighter noses than they do cheeks, and the skin of their torso varies in shade from top to bottom and from side to side. But they don’t. Apart from the effects of tanning, and local epithelial discolourations, our skin is quite uniform in colour. Where there are differences in “normal tones,” such as hair and bruises being darker than skin, we find that there is no reversal on the Shroud. They are dark in life, and they are dark on the Shroud.

E2. The luminance distribution of both front and back images can be correlated to the clearances between the 3-D surface of the body and the covering cloth. This is why the TS is a 3-D image.

E1 (reversed tones) and E2 (3D) can be accepted.

Fanti grants that some 3D effect in apparent in my samples, which I think is generous, but again, the criterion is confused. It contradicts statement E1 above. Either the colour on the cloth relates to the “normal tones of light and dark” on a human body, or it relates to the distance between a part of the body and an enveloping both. It cannot do both, except where coincidentally, a normally light part of the body is also more protuberant than an adjacent part.

The hair and beard, and the bruises on the cheeks, would be darker on a real man than the skin, and are darker on the Shroud. Their relative brightness is not reversed, as it would be in a negative. They appear dark not because they were actually white, but because they were protuberant.

Furthermore, if the intensity of colour is pre-defined as related to the distance between a body and a cloth, then regardless of its shape, the position of the cloth is bound to fit it, by simple extrapolation.

E3. Image distortions of hands, calves and torso correspond to the wrapping of a man in a sheet. Therefore, considering Ref. 1, the TS wrapped a dead human body.

E3 (distortions) are not easy to determine in a bas-relief.

No, the image distortions on the Shroud do not correspond to the wrapping of a man in a sheet. Fanti has spend many hours wrapping “various statues” in semi-transparent copies of the Shroud, and invariably created wrinkles and creases which have no representation on the Shroud at all. The Ref. 1 referred to³ falls into exactly the same logical fallacy as this one, basically saying that because the Shroud is genuine it cannot be an artificial creation, and therefore any ‘body’ it may have wrapped must, without further discussion, have been a real human one.

One of Fanti’s experiments wrapping a body.
There are numerous creases and wrinkles which have no representation on the Shroud of Turin at all.

E4. Some bloodstains also appear outside the body image.

E4 (bloodstains) are intentionally forgotten to oversimplify the experiment.

It wasn’t oversimplification at all, The bloodstains are not involved in image formation.

E5. The body image has a resolution of 4.9 ±0.5mm but no well-defined contours. This means the body image seems to disappear if one looks at it from a distance closer than about one metre.

E5 (contours), even if the scale effect must be considered, shows contours that are too accentuated to infirm that’s an image similar to the TS has been reproduced.

I think by ‘contours,’ Fanti means ‘edges.’ As my experiments were on a much smaller scale than the Shroud, the resolution is in most places much better than 5mm, and the edges correspondingly more defined. My images were also darker, and thus the contrast greater than the Shroud, so you have to get much closer before distinguishing the image from the background becomes difficult.

E6. The front image, at least near parts of the head, is doubly superficial. This means that the 0.34-mm thick-fabric presents a superficial image on one side( about 0.03 mm thick), no image in the middle and another superficial image on the other side.

Regarding E6 (double superficiality), we find an effect different from that of the TS image. In some areas of the back of the linen fabric, we find some spots consistent with the image of the front side, but these spots do not appear because of a double superficiality. Instead, they appear because the colour has been absorbed in the whole thickness of the fabric, thus passing from one side to the other.

I don’t believe in “double superficiality,” and have not come across any evidence for it. We can see, and Fanti himself points out, the dark image fibres disappearing deep into the clefts between the threads, and there is no reason to suppose that, if it does emerge on the other side, the colourant does not simply seep through.

E7. The colouration does not appear under the threads where they cross in the weave of the cloth.

Evidence E7 (crossing threads) is verified in many cases.

This is, I find, variable in quite a consistent way. Where the colouration seems to continue into, and under the crossing threads, there it reappears on the other side. Where it does not manage to find a way through, then it does not reappear on the other side.

E8. The image fibres are adjacent to non-yellowed fibres: striations are evident.

Evidence E8 return (striations) is not verified except in some very rare cases that cannot be considered typical of the result analysed.

I don’t think this is true. Especially on the ‘scrubbed’ sample, some areas are clearly lighter than others, although the applied colourant is uniform. The two possible causes for the variation in brightness are described and illustrated above, in the discussion of uniformity. Either some fibres are coloured and others not, in a dichotomous way, or there is a variation in colorant across all the fibres visible in a single thread from lots to zero. The truth, as we shall see, is a mixture of the two.

Enlargement of part of the 6cm x 4cm sample illustrated above.

Two transmitted light and one reflected light image showing “striations.”

E9. Colour is frequently concentrated in the crevices where two or more threads cross each other.

Evidence E9 (crevices) fails; indeed, a position of the colour is accentuated in proximity to the protuberances of the thread with respect to the plain of the fabric.

No. As we can see, my colour dives just as deeply into the clefts between threads as does the colour of the Shroud.

E10. There is no cementation between fibres or signs of capillary flow in the image areas.

Evidence E10 (cementation), although not frequent, contrary to the TS image, is found above all in the areas of more intense colour.

Quite true. Probably too high a proportion of egg yolk, although Fanti is gracious enough to admit that cementation is not frequent. I suspect that he studied a much larger proportion of my image than he ever has of the Shroud image.

E11. The linen fibres of the image lie only on the uppermost portions of the threads, leaving the inner fibres uncoloured.

Evidence E11 (uppermost portions) is not [verified in many cases].

As I have already demonstrated, it is actually quite difficult to get paint to soak through an entire thread. It doesn’t happen on the Shroud, and it doesn’t happen in my experiments.

E12. The fibres are uniformly coloured around their cylindrical surface, whereas variations in colour intensity can be detected along the fibres. The colour is not concentrated in spots as we could expect from a pigmented fibre.

Evidence E12 (uniformly coloured) is perhaps the most important way to highlight the complete non-conformity of the proposed method with respect to the characteristics of the TS fibres, which are uniform coloured without showing pigment traces.

This is the true crux of the possible difference between the “paint” versus “radiation” hypotheses. Fanti illustrates the ‘failure’ of my experiment with the following micrograph.

And it appears he’s quite right. The colour appears to be entirely a feature of the yellow ochre particles, and not at all thanks to discolouration of the fibre itself. On the other hand, Fanti does not show what a non-image fibre looks like, so we can’t be sure if the conclusion is correct. Here, then, are increasingly large magnifications of the coloured and uncoloured fibre tangles in the sample photographed above. Note that, unlike almost every other comparison photo of Shroud fibres, whether by McCrone, Adler, Nitowski, Kohlbeck, Adler or Fanti, all these photos were taken at the same time (over a few minutes), of the same slide, using the same illumination, so that a valid comparison can be made

Firstly, even I am surprised by the apparent lack of pigment particles. There are far fewer than I was expecting, given the thickness of the colour applied, and apparently obvious from the photo of the whole sample. Consequently, we can very clearly see that the chromophore is not principally created by pigment particles.

To try to track down the elusive particles, we can close the light input aperture, which tends to increase the contrast and the depth of field, and introduces diffraction effects suggesting otherwise invisible characteristics.

Sure enough, a handful of particles have appeared, and no doubt contribute to the overall colour, but these photos bear comparison with Shroud fibres.

Compare this to one of Eugenia Nitowski’s photos:

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.

Of Giulio Fanti’s 12 criteria, then, this is my take:
E1 – Shroud is pseudo-negative – My experiment conforms
E2 – Shroud is 3D – My experiment conforms
E3 – Shroud distortions fit actual man – Untrue or unverified
E4 – Blood – Irrelevant
E5 – Shroud image has blurred edges – My image fails due to its small scale
E6 – Double Superficiality – Untrue or unverified
E7 – No colour under threads – Untrue or unverified
E8 – Shroud has ‘striations’ – My experiment conforms
E9 – Shroud colour is found in clefts – My experiment conforms
E10 – Shroud shows no cementation – My image fails due to too much egg
E11 – Shroud image doesn’t penetrate the threads – My experiment conforms
E12 – The nature of the discolouration – Difficult to be sure…

But have I won a million pounds? David Rolfe’s criteria are more comprehensive, but as regards the image…

R1 – Colour only darkens Primary Cell Wall – My experiment conforms
R2a – All Shroud fibres are either uniformly similarly coloured or not – Untrue or unverified
R2b – The Shroud is 3D – My experiment conforms
R3 – The Shroud fibres are uniformly coloured around their circumference – Untrue or unverified
R4 – The Shroud front and back images show the same intensity – My modus operandi conforms
R5a – The Shroud has no visible pigment particles – My experiment conforms
R5b – The Shroud has no visible stain – Untrue or unverified
R6 – Blood – Irrelevant
R7 – The Shroud is pseudo-negative – My experiment conforms
R8 – The Shroud uses medieval techniques and materials – My modus operandi conforms

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.

1 From the famous “d’Arcis memorandum,’ reproduced in Ulysse Chevalier, Étude critique sur l’origine du st. suaire de Lirey-Chambéry-Turin, 1900

2 Chevalier, op. cit.

3 A Summary of STuRP’s Conclusions, at shroud.com

4 Larry Schwalbe and Ray Rogers, ‘Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin,’ Analytica Chimica Acta, 1982

5 Walter McCrone, ‘The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist’s Pigment,’ Accounts of Chemical Research, 1990

6 “Most iron red pigments are very finely divided (less than 1 micrometre) and appear orange in colour.” ‘Red Pigments,’ Pigment ID, Peter and Ann Mactaggart, International Academic Projects, at academicprojects.co.uk/red-pigments.

7 Schwalbe and Rogers, op. cit.

8 ‘Report of Turin Commission on the Holy Shroud’

9 John Heller and Alan Adler, ‘A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences Journal, 1981

10 Roger Morris, Larry Schwalbe and Ronald London, ‘X-Ray Fluorescence Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ X-Ray Spectrometry, 1980

11 Walter McCrone, ‘Light Microscopical Study of the Turin Shroud,’ The Microscope, 1980

12 McCrone, 1990, op. cit.

13 Images from Giulio Fanti, ‘Microscopic and Macroscopic Characteristics of the Shroud of Turin Image Superficiality,’ Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2010, re-captioned by me.

14 Heller and Adler, op. cit.

15 Alan Adler, ‘The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin,’ 1999, at shroud.com

16 Eugenia Nitowski (Sister Damien of the Cross, OCD), ‘Criteria for Authentication: A Procedure for the Verification of Shroud Samples,’ 1986, privately circulated

17 Alan Adler, The Orphaned Manuscript, 2002

18 The possibility of the use of oak gall ink is discussed by STuRP member Joseph Accetta in ‘Origins of a 14th Century Shroud Image.’

19 Description in letter from HF to GF, accompanying samples, 2025

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