Popular commenters on the Shroud invariably mention the 1978 investigations carried out by the STuRP team, but usually forget that an earlier scientific investigation had already been carried out by an Italian Commission, with almost contradictory results. One reason for this is the difficulty of obtaining much detailed information regarding the earlier report, which seems not to have been widely published. The Holy Should Guild, a repository of early Shroud related information currently curated by Giorgio Bracaglia, has an English language version, consisting of a pdf of 125 typed pages, but without any diagrams or illustrations. The original pagination of the Italian report is indicated in the margin. That only consisted of 120 pages, but several of the translated pages have been inadvertently duplicated.
The English version is headed: “REPORT OF TURIN COMMISSION OF THE HOLY SHROUD, Translated from the Italian by Mrs. Maria Jepps, Fr. Eric Doyle, O.F.M., Fr Maurus Green, Miss Ossola, and others.” Slightly disconcertingly, the bottom of the page bears: “World copyright: Screenpro films, 5 Mears St., London, W1V 3HQ. 1996.” This suggests that the translation was made for David Rolfe, whose 1978 film, The Silent Witness, was produced by Screenpro, perhaps in anticipation of another film, which came to nothing at the time.
The next page (Page 5 in the margin), is headed ‘Introduction’ and begins, “This appendix to the Turin diocesan magazine sets out the reports giving an account of the research and studies undertaken on the Holy Shroud by the Commission of Experts nominated in 1969 by the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Michele Pellegrino.” This page is dated and undersigned, “Turin, 20th January, 1976.” “Rev. Pietro Caramello, Chairman of the Commission.”
There follows a great deal of procedural Informationt, and a description of the grid that was used to identify positions on the cloth. This is further described in an appendix at the end of the report. A photo was taken, “on which was traced an accurate grid in centimetres.” It is a pity that this grid is not reproduced – anywhere as far as I know – as it may have helped better to identify exactly where the threads subsequently extracted came from, which is otherwise far from obvious. It seems that the Shroud on the photo was given a nominal length of 4.36m, and “Prof. Codegone arranged for a centimetre grid to be traced on it in black lines in Indian ink.” Later, after some samples had been taken, “the plan was again calibrated in centimetres in the present condition of the holy shroud, spread horizontally on the table during the above mentioned removals. From the measurements taken and calculations made the result was that every square corresponded to 3.94 cm on the cloth.” There were 111 squares along (labelled 1 to 111), and 29 squares across (labelled A to Z, lower case, and A to C, upper case).
The only clue to the reconstruction of this grid is in the description of the Raes sample, which is as follows: “this fragment was situated along column 110, across the two squares 110 A B, of a triangular form, a right-angled triangle with a base of 40mm in square 110 A , the minor cathetus along the line separating columns 110 and 109 (13mm long), and the hypotenuse in square 110 B (42mm long).” As it happens, this description seems almost completely wrong (discussed below), but it does suggest that the Shroud was ‘side-strip downwards.’ The 111 squares along give a length of 437.3cm, and the 29 squares across the cloth give a width of 114.3cm.
Extraction of Samples
Page 25 (of the Italian report) begins, “the removal of samples began,” and lists the extractions.
Notes:
1. If my reconstruction is at all accurate, the first three samples were taken from the “Raes corner.”
2. The ‘letter’ component of each co-ordinate is variously given in upper-case, lower-case and using numerical 1 instead of alphabetical i.
3. The ‘Raes sample’ is especially problematical.
This diagram illustrates the Raes problem:
The Raes sample can be described as various kinds of triangle, with two approximately equal sides, but however it is looked at, the short side is at the edge of the cloth, and the point towards the middle. There is no sense in which “the minor cathetus” can be “along the line separating columns 110 and 109.
Various Examinations Considered
On Page 31 the various reports begin, with an assessment of the feasibility of a radiocarbon test by Prof. Cesare Codegone. The professor concluded that at the time, any date obtained would be too imprecise to be useful, and that “at least three or four” samples of about 900 square centimetres would be needed.
On Page 41, Enzo Delorenzi describes some experiments he had conducted with X-rays, and although he recognised that heavy metals, such as those found in some pigments would show up, he thought that organic materials or dyes or paints would not show up, nor would spices such as myrrh, and nor would blood, as, although it contains iron, not in sufficient quantities to be detectable. His conclusion was: “on the basis of these researches of mine, I feel that I have enough evidence to conclude that X-ray research on the Holy Shroud would not give useful results.”
Delorenzi continued with a revue of the “spectroscopic analysis of fluorescence using gamma rays on bloodstained cloth.” In an experiment, he found that the iron in bloodstains was readily distinguishable from the background – four times as much – and that chlorine and potassium was detectable in blood but not at all on unstained cloth. However, he recognised that his experiments had used blood at a much greater density than anything found on the Shroud, and he was, personally, “rather sceptical as to the practical possibilities of really determinative analyses with this method.”
Blood
Finally, on Page 49, Professors Giorgio Frache, Eugenia Mari Rizzatti and Emilio Mari, reported on some observations on the actual Shroud. Their report was entitled: “A Definitive Report on the Haematological Investigations carried out on Material taken from the Shroud.”
The tests were actually carried out by Prof. Rizzatti, while the others observed, checked and confirmed her observations. They used: 1 – samples 4 and 5 above, from the area of the blood belt; 2 – sample 3, presumably as a control; 3 – sample 6, also from near the blood belt; 4 – samples 7, 8 and 9, from near the heel; and 5 – sample 5, from the bottom of the foot.
A preliminary observation was that “the fibres appear to be basically ivory-white in colour, though not uniformly so, having fairly regular patches which are darker, approaching a brownish colour. These patches show where they belong in the texture of the cloth, in the pattern of the weft and warp.” I think this refers to something like this (below), although it is not clear whether this particular photo shows actual discolouration or just shadow.
Their 5 sample groups were then studied individually, firstly without mounting, under a stereoscopic microscope.
No.1 (blood belt area): “appeared as a whole to be made up of numerous fibres of a shiny honey yellow-colour. At the level of the zones which also appeared darker to the naked eye, the surface fibres take on a more intense colouring, a fairly uniform reddish colour. This colouring is found only on the surface fibres, so much so that the above-mentioned colouring was only observed on the reverse of the thread at the level of the underlying favours by transparency.” I think this means that when the thread was turned upside down, the regular discolourations observed previously (now “reddish”) were still visible, but clearly only because they could be seen through the intervening fibres, not because the discolouration was present on all the fibres. This observation is often made of ‘image’ threads, but not of ‘blood’ threads, although when one of these threads was extracted (No. 5 in the ‘extraction table,’ which snapped on extraction into two pieces, both of which ended up as part of sample 1), “it could be observed that’s the reddish tint of the thread was limited to the surface, while the inside appeared to be perfectly white.”
No. 2 (Raes corner): “show the same characteristics as the preceding. In these, however, there is no evidence either of colouration or of granulation.” Slightly curious, as no granulation was mentioned with respect to the previous sample. I assume that the lack of ‘colouration’ means that the general regular discolouration observed on the samples as a whole was present, but that it did not appear “reddish” under greater magnification.
No. 3 (blood belt area): “show similar characteristics as the preceding. There is presence on slanting bands of a very light and superficial encrustation of reddish colouring and have granules of the same colour, which are present on the whole circumference of the surface fibres.”
Nos. 4 and 5 (heel area): “show presence of bands of heterogeneous material in a slanting direction of reddish colour, granular, to be found only on the surface fibres along the whole of the circumference.”
The observation seems to be that on pieces of thread identified as ‘blood,’ the blood manifests itself as granules which have wicked their way around the thread, without penetrating into the central fibres, perhaps because they were so tightly twisted together. Samples No. 1, which I have suggested are from the blood belt area, do not appear to have these characteristics, so are from nearby, rather than actually on the ‘belt.’ The fact that the heterogeneous material occurs in bands seems to suggest that nothing affected the threads where they passed over each other, again perhaps because they were too tightly compacted at those places.
At an enlargement of “63 diameters,” the threads, with their fibres “slightly separated by histological needle,” were then squashed between glass slides for high magnification observation. They “appeared to be made of numerous vegetable fibres, regular enough, without evident encrustations of heterogeneous material, with the presence of some colourless crystals.” We seem to have lost the red granules and gained some colourless crystals, but it is not suggested that the two are the same.
At greater magnification (285 diameters):
No. 1 (blood belt, but perhaps not very bloody): “few granulations of colour from yellow red to orange denser at the diagonal bands, corresponding to the parts visually darker in the microscopic investigation.”
No. 2 (Raes corner): “Absence of pigmented bands.”
Nos. 3, 4 and 5 (blood belt and heel areas): “diagonal bands of fine pigmentation of a yellow-red orange colour and with some coarser granules, but very rare, black or green in colour. These granulations affected the majority of the fibres, indeed substantially so, but they were not found in the spaces between the fibres.”
There follows a slightly confusing paragraph. “The microscopic examination, in natural light, of the different threads previously having been treated with an acid solution, sulphuric acid, was completed by putting all the material through a microscopic examination in ultra-violet light, in order to show up the possible existence of fluorescence as typical of all haemoglobin derivates.” I think this means that after the examinations previously described, the material was treated with sulphuric acid and then examined by UV light. Whatever they did, “the examination showed negative results,” so it was concluded that no “haemoglobin derivates” were present.
Also, treatment of the fibres with acetic acid and soda did not change the colour of the granulations, although glycerine of potassium and ammonium sulphate made them “appear to assume a darker colouring with a clearly brown tone, after some time.” There is no discussion of the relevance of the result.
The next tests were chemical. Benzedine is a presumptive test for blood, and results in the clear benzedine turning blue. No such discolouration was observed; nor was there any discolouration of the alleged ‘blood.’
Although the benzedine test was negative, another attempt to identify blood was made by the spectroscopic examination of possible haemochromagen, which Encyclopaedia Brittanica says is: “useful in determining whether a stain is blood because it can be formed from an old blood stain and because, of all blood pigments, it can be identified in the greatest dilution.” The possible blood granules were treated with a 33% solution of ‘soda’ (sodium hydroxide), but were not observed to dissolve. This in itself was enough to refute the presence of blood, but subsequent procedures were carried out anyway and, as predicted, were uniformly negative.
Finally a thin layer chromatography test was carried out, which also proved negative.
The conclusion of this part of the report was: “the results of the investigation in the laboratory of forensic medicine made up to the present time in the area of generic diagnosis tends to exclude the presence of blood, even of the slightest traces in the material under study.” Even so, two further experiments were carried out, namely an attempt to diagnose specifically human blood using “the siero-precipitation method in agar on a slide,” which failed, and an attempt to type the blood, “using a method (absorption-elution) research into the specific group property of cloth, which in its turn did not produce evidence of antigens A and B.”
This succession of negative findings was devastating to any possiblilty of the Turin Shroud being the burial cloth of Jesus, and the authors made desperate attempt to hedge their bets. Scientifically, they felt that their tests were both extremely sensitive, and quite irrefutably negative, but even so, the possibility of false negatives “does not permit us to make an absolute judgement about the exclusion of haematic substance from the material under examination.”
Further Microscopical Studies
The next report was by Professor Guido Filogamo and Alberto Zina, who examined the material of the threads, although their first observation was of “the characteristic presence of granules having different forms and diameter, and of a red colour.”
Filogama and Zino stained their threads blue and mounted them in resin. The threads were biconcave in cross-section (like a rounded off crescent), with a hole in the middle. The granules were of three types:
1): “Granules of amorphous material dense with electrons.” They found this material to be of an “indeterminable nature.”
2): “Roundish or oval bodies of 0.5 to 0.7 micron in which were noted an external capsule, a membrane, and an opaque central portion.” These were identified as bacterial spores.
3): “Fat, roundish bodies of 2 micron diameter, apparently surrounded with membrane and constituted over material finally granular, dishomogeneously distributed, and of different electron density.” These, they thought, were, “probably of an organic nature.” However, the authors did not identify these bodies with blood corpuscles. Although “the possibility that formations of this kind maybe red globules cannot be excluded with absolute certainty, but some signs, dimensions, the appearance of the granulation, makes such an identity improbable.”
Archaeology
On page 59 begins a long report by Silvio Curto, Professor of Egyptology and Curator of Egyptian Antiquities at the University of Turin. After some consideration of the gospels as reliable historical documents, and the applicability of some historical mentions of Jesus’s shroud to the Shroud of Turin, of which he seems most impressed by the de Clari account (“a last mention in 1204 in which image the image is clearly described”), Curto makes the “obvious” point that “the existing indications are a lang way from proving that the shroud, so to speak, of the Gospel and the one from Turin are one and the same.”
Curto goes on to discuss the cloth itself, saying that although its size is consistent with first century Egyptian manufacture, its twill weave certainly isn’t, as all Egyptian sheeting is plain tabby until, at the earliest, the 2nd century.
The image he describes as “sepia with a touch of yellow ochre hue,” and for the blood: “darker brownish marks on the body represent the trickle of blood or serum issuing from the wounds; we can also pick out two traces of crimson, simulating trickles of blood – which however turns brown when dry, therefore these marks must certainly have been added later and deliberately.” Frustratingly, Curto does not mention where these two artificial trickles may be found.
Curto then discusses four possible descriptions of the origins of the image, and how they can relate to the image as it appears. Firstly he dismisses the possibility that the image is the result of the impression of the corpse in contact with the cloth, as the result of bodily fluids or ointments, for three reasons: that the back image should be much darker than the front, that the front image would show the wraparound distortion mentioned by many other commenters, and that the head image (if the face was covered with a Sudarium) would be much fainter than the rest. He goes on to make the suggestion that if this method of imaging is considered, “it should be checked out with observation of other similar relics, for instance a shroud with the imprint of the body of a martyr of the 9th century, kept originally in Rome, in the church of Saint Agatha ‘die Goti all Suburra,’ and now in the Vatican Museum.” I am wholly unfamiliar with this example, and have never heard it mentioned In sindonological circles. Frustratingly, the English translation of the Commission’s report does not include the footnotes or sources frequently enumerated in the text.
Curto’s second consideration is that the image could be the result of artistic effort, “with brushes and colours,” but dating to the time of Christ and being a portrait of him. “This suggestion should be rejected without question, since it was recently established that no substances whatsoever, even colouring matter, have impregnated the threads of the Shroud. Furthermore, and with even better reason, because the portraits of Egyptian production are completely different: they are in bright colours, with sharp outline, and appear to be of living persons richly clothed; also, nearly all of them show three quarters of the face and the body slightly turned to one side; lastly, they were done for the sitter when alive, and then used as shrouds.”
The third possibility is translated as stamping, but I think “imprinting” may be a better word. As this is further discussed by another member of the commission, Curto restricts himself to saying that block prints were known at the time of Christ, but that the “moulds were generally blocks into which the pattern was carved and with sharp edges, and produced sharply outlined impressions; moulds in relief, producing shaded impressions, are also known but are much rarer, and possibly from a later date.” However, he goes on to point out, the moulds from the first centuries AD are all very small; moulds of the size necessary to print the Shroud “would likely to be from a later period – probably the Renaissance – of improved technique.” Quite so.
Finally, Curto suggests that having laid the corpse on one half of the sheet, the other half could have been stretched out horizontally over the body, and the portrait resulting at precisely that moment, “in circumstances which acted as a photographic process.”
Moving on to an examination of what is portrayed by the image, rather than the method by which it appears, Curto seems to find himself in a bit of dilemma, explaining that the anatomical knowledge required was not available until the 13th century, so that the Shroud could not be an artificial production from any earlier. The “nails though the wrists” observation, for example, “could only have been made after the “modern” method of scientific anatomical studies was first introduced during the 13th century – and following the first artistic representations of this detail, begun in the 14th century by Masaccio and Donatello.” What’s more, “until the third century the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern culture seems to ignore the portrayal of the corpse; this type of portrayal is created later, within the sphere of the new Christian culture, and specifically to represent the Christ Deposed (as also Crucified) in the Cycle of the Passion.”
Curto’s conclusions are inconclusive…
Firstly, that the cloth may date to the time of Christ. Or may not.
Secondly, that the image is either authentic, and formed by some photographic process, or of a model, and produced by some kind of printing process, no earlier than the tenth century.
But finally, “for our part we must say that we are inclined to think that it is an artistic impression.”
The rest of Curto’s report is a consideration of how the Shroud should be kept in order to maintain its future integrity, basically flat, or very briefly upright with its long sides parallel to the ground, and kept, laid out, in a steel container of inert gas, with a glass cover.
Art History
Page 87. Noemi Gabrielli was Italy’s leading Art Historian and curator, with a particular interest in the late medieval and Renaissance period, and had been responsible for the preservation of the great collections of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin during the war, and, just before she retired in 1966, for the restoration of the frescoes of Giovanni Martino Spanzotti in Ivrea. She was 72 when she was recruited to advise on the Shroud, and had no doubt that it was a work from the 15th century, produced by an imprinting method. However, since the woodblock print of the Middle Ages was flat and had well defined edges, while the Shroud has differences in tone and very poorly defined ages, she thought it was probably a print from a painted fabric, while still wet, placed on the Shroud and pressed down. The pigment she thought was “a compound of sepia-coloured clay and yellow ochre diluted in a resinous liquid.” This, she thought, would not penetrate the fabric to the other side.
Artistically, she thought the facial image showed an anatomical precision that “existed in classical and Paleo-Christian art until the 5th century AD and which re-appeared in Florentine paintings and in Italian art of the Renaissance.” Furthermore it showed a psychological depth which does not appear in classical art, whose masters “were only worried about reproducing exactly the external somatic features,” but which does appear “in Romanesque art and is evident in the works with Pietro Cavallini and Benedetto Antelani and is again proposed by Giotto, Masaccio and by the Masters of the Renaissance.”
She concluded firmly: “it is the work of a great artist of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, who used the Leonardo technique of shading,” and implied, without being definite, that Leonardo da Vinci was quite probably the painter.
The rest of the document consists of articles by Gian Battista Judica Cordiglia on how he photographed the Shroud, a very detailed account of the various patches, darns and stitches by Enzo Delorenzi (which he described as “a very dull description”), and Gilbert Raes’s description of his little sample. Strangely there is no mention of Max Frei’s sticky tape samples at all.
So in 1973, a Commission of Experts, all Italian, all Catholic, and many from Turin, decided that the Shroud was medieval. What happened in 1978 to result in the opposite conclusion?
“B.L.U.D., blood!”
It is entirely down to the blood. Five Italian Scientists, including the Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Modena (and author of Medicia Legale delle Assicurazioni), and two of his colleagues, both professors, and the Director of Human Anatomy at the University of Turin, and one of his colleagues, examined several centimetres of whole thread, and carried out several standard tests for blood, and found none, although they did find “fine pigmentation of a yellow-red orange colour.” In 1979 Walter McCrone, the most respected particle microscopist of his day, examined, intact, the sticky tape samples taken by Ray Rogers the year before, and also saw granular incrustation, which he said resembled red ochre but not blood. And then later that year, John Heller, doctor, physiologist, assistant professor at Yale and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Study of Early Man; and Alan Adler, expert in porphyries and author of The Chemical and Physical Behavior of Porphyrin Compounds and Related Structures, examined “less than a dozen possible bloodstained fibrils, and a single brownish red translucent crystal.”
Given the paucity of material, it is not surprising that Heller and Adler were cautious about wasting it. However their initial investigations, by spectroscope, were very clearly affected by a pre-disposition towards blood, as I have pointed out before. In particular, their identification of a Soret band, which would have been quite diagnostic of porphyrin compounds, was clearly unjustified. Tellingly, although they subsequently decided not to use the standard chemical test for blood (benzidine) because it could give false positive reactions, they do not comment that it very rarely gives false negatives. Had they used it, as the Italians did, they would have achieved the same negative result.
Instead, Heller and Adler decided to convert the suspected haem group to a porphyrin, by reducing the iron to its ferrous state and then treating it with a strong acid to displace the iron. “The acid porphyrin dication [di-cation] so formed fluoresces red strongly under long wave UV radiation.” They therefore “peeled back the sticky tape from the glass slide and exposed the shroud fibrils to, first, hydrazine [97%] vapour and then formic acid [97%] vapour. Radiation with longwave UV then showed several red fluorescent spots indicative of the presence of a porphyrin species on the shroud fibrils.” Interestingly, although controls of blood-spotted linen were compared to this finding, there were no controls involving red ochre, or of unstained linen, either or both of which might have demonstrated a similar result.
[See: Blood on the Shroud of Turin, Heller John H., and Adler, Alan D., at shroud.com]
Later on, when more copious supplies of “blood” fibrils were available, the presumptive tests for blood were still not carried out. However they were able to dissolve the ‘blood’ fragments more completely n liquid hydrazine.
[See: A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin, Heller John H., and Adler, Alan D., at shroud.com]
I am lucky enough to have videotaped a BBC programme of the QED series shown in 1983 called “Shroud of Jesus: Fact or Fake?” At one point we see Adler crouched over a spotting plate with a teat pipette, with Heller watching. Adler says: “All right John, I’m going to add the hydrazine.” A few drops land on the plate, which fizzes briefly and glows under the ultra-violet light. Adler says: “It’s giving a positive haemochromagen test.”
Heller: “OK, so that’s blood.”
Adler: There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is blood; B.L.U.D. blood!”
As it happens, I think Adler was probably right, and subsequent investigations into blood type by Pierluigi Baima Bollone have tended to confirm this, but those who wish to challenge that conclusion have some grounds for doing so. Porphyrins can be derived from any number of biological materials, and the absence of blood antibodies, or antigens, although diagnostic if blood is already determined, is characteristic of everything which isn’t blood as well.
Nowadays there are several good diagnostic tests for blood, any of which could determine with much greater precision whether there is real blood on the Shroud or not.