A common comment regarding the unlikelihood of a medieval provenance for the Shroud is that the figures of Jesus are naked, which some people think would have been anathema to medieval sensibilities. This is due to ignorance rather than research. Jesus is typically depicted nude as an infant, almost always at his baptism, and occasionally during his passion and burial, particularly in 12th century Psalters and 13th century Books of Hours. In addition, Adam and Eve, Noah, and various saints whose deaths implied nudity, such as the martyrdom of Saints Bartholomew (1st Century AD), who was flayed alive, Lawrence (258 AD), who was roasted on a gridiron, and Vincent (c. 300 AD) who was stretched, flayed, roasted, rolled on broken shards of pottery and thrown into the sea. Prisoners and the damned are also often shown naked.
Artists of the Middle Ages revelled in these adventures, and were not shy of depicting them, culminating in the Rohan Hours, created about 1420, which contains nearly a hundred paintings of nude people, including multiple versions of Christ being scourged, carrying his cross, crucified and buried.
What, however, they never show, is genitals. From the baptism of Christ in a mosaic from about 500 AD in the Arian Baptistry in Ravenna to some crucifixes attributed to Michaelangelo about a thousand years later, biblical genitals are generally taboo. Sometimes bodies are turned coyly away, their near leg modestly pushed forward to obscure the groin, but mostly genitals are simply omitted altogether. From the waist down, men and women are as sexless as Ken and Barbie.
Although nakedness did not pose a problem in infancy or baptism pictures, early images of Jesus’s passion and death usually showed him in some kind of loincloth. However, over the years, this became increasingly transparent, until eventually he was as naked as earlier in his life.
The Cappadocia region of central Turkey became a focus of Christian worship from the fourth century onwards. It is typified by termite-mound-like outcrops of soft, easily excavated volcanic rock, and dozens of churches, monasteries and hermitages were dug out of them, some of them in groups very close to each other, which, after the end of iconoclasm in the ninth century, were often richly decorated. They fell out of use around the twelfth century when the Moslem Seljuks occupied the region, and although they were far from unknown, and possibly used as churches again in later centuries, most of their restored decoration is from tenth to twelfth century.
The most impressive, and most, visited collection of these excavations is in the Goreme valley, where about sixty can be found within a few square miles. Fifteen of the best preserved, at the southern end of the valley are now collectively called, somewhat incongruously I think, the Goreme Open Air Museum. It is not possible that the painters of later churches in this area were ignorant of those that came before, only a few hundred meters away, and many of the scenes, such as of the life of Christ, are clearly derivative, although it is not always easy to determine the order they were painted. A website called Cappadocia History (cappadociahistory.com) details many of them, and the information that follows is largely taken from it.
Three Baptisms, from the Elmali (“Apple”), Karanlik (“Dark”), and Tokali (“Buckle”) Churches,
in the Goreme Valley, Cappadocia, Turkey. All 10th to 12th centuries.
I don’t see any progression in these depictions, except perhaps in artistic skill. Christ is clearly naked in all three, and the waters of the Jordan do nothing to conceal him. All the same, modesty is preserved by anatomical omission.
Crucifixions, from the Tokali (“Buckle”), Elmali (“Apple”), Karanlik (“Dark”) and Sandal Churches.
Here, although Tokali is first instead of last, we can derive a progression from clothed to fully naked, via increasingly transparent loincloths. Modesty, however, is nevertheless preserved.
The theme of the transparent loincloth which nevertheless reveals nothing is taken up in the late 13th century in Italy, an idea I explored in “Giotto’s Jesus,” which particularly concentrated on crucifixions, but which can be extended to paintings of the scourging and lamentation.
Cimabue, Flagellation, c.1280; Simone di Martini, Entombment, c.1340; Unknown, Lamentation, 14th C.
Unknown, Lamentation, 1164; Ugolino Lorenzetti, Lamentation, c.1350
During the 14th century, the rather obvious emasculation of Christ was not fitting in well with current ideas about his physicality, a more literal interpretation of the word “incarnation,” and increased emphasis on the pathology of his passion. Openly displaying that Jesus was rather less than a man became in some places artistically and theologically unfashionable, but there was, as there is now, still a marked reluctance to exhibit what were considered, even then, private.
One solution to the problem was to cross the hands over the groin, a tactic which had already been used in other circumstances, but which was now applied to Christ as well.
St Vincent, panel from the altar front of the Church of Santa María del Monte in Liesa, Spain, late 13th C.
St Lawrence, Vies des Saints, 14th Century.
St Lawrence, Stowe Breviary, 14th Century.
Christ, Pray Codex, Hungary, c.1200.
Christ, Fresco in Hamra Church, Gotland, early 15th Century.
All this demonstrates that the image on the Shroud, of a naked Christ with his hands crossed over his groin, is not as improbable or as uncharacteristic of its time as is often claimed.