By special request.
A common authenticist trope is that of the imagined medieval genius, skilled not only in the arcane arts of the 14th century but also with incredible foresight into the 20th and 21st, producing a negative image without any means of observing the positive, determining exactly the shading required for intensity/distance software to convert into a perfect 3D representation before even the concept existed, matching his blood-source to the type of all the other such relics in existence, including eucharistic miracles that hadn’t yet occurred, collecting pollen, limestone and ancient coins from Jerusalem, and finally, doing all this from a distance of ten feet as he couldn’t see his work from any closer, using a single squirrel hair brush to colour individual fibres of each thread. It’s an entertaining Aunt Sally, but so far removed from anything either necessary or credible as to reinforce the generally held opinion that authenticity doesn’t really have a leg to stand on.
This particular post is inspired by a request from Pam Moon to review a paper she wrote in 2022, updated by a brief appendix a few days ago.1 She quotes Napoleon: “Forethought we may have,
undoubtedly, but not foresight,”2 and her emphasis is on the alleged photographic quality of the image. “The medieval Shroud artist would not know what photography was, so they could not have had the foresight to include its properties in their image.” The logic of this is: Premise 1 – the Shroud is a photograph. Premise 2 – Photography was unknown until 1850. Inescapable Deduction – The Shroud could not have been made 500 years earlier. And it is truly, an inescapable deduction from the premises.
But for its truth, the Deduction depends entirely on the truth of the Premises, both of which have been denied.
1). The Shroud is in no sense but the metaphorical, a photograph. A photograph is created when light from an external source reflects off a surface and impinges on a light-sensitive material in such a way that any single point on the surface has a corresponding point on the material. The darker the surface the less light is reflected, and the less it registers on the ‘film,’ and depending on the light source, shadows will be formed, from which, however reflective the surface, less light reflects because less light arrives. Dark areas of the skin, like the hair, lips and bruises, and shadows, would affect the ‘film’ less than lighter areas, like the cheeks, eyelids and forehead. We do not see this on the Shroud. Some attempts to demonstrate this kind of photograph have been suggested by T.C. Newman3 and Gilbert Lavoie,4 but they have not been found convincing, mostly because if the light source were outside the body, it would also be outside its shroud, and affect any sensitive material on its way through to the body, ruining the photograph before it was even begun, and also because there is no obvious focussing device to give a clear image. A looser definition of a photograph might include any wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum affecting any material, which has been explored by Nathan Wilson,5 and compared to the shadow images created at Hiroshima in 1945.6 In these cases the ‘body’ is between the light source and the film, and the area affected is outside the silhouette of the body, rather than inside, as in the Shroud. Finally, it may be speculated that the ‘light’ originated either within or on the surface of the body, and radiated, vertically up and down to the surface of the Shroud. Experiments with infra-red7 and ultra-violet8 seem to have had some success in this respect, but are constrained by the absorption, or not, of the radiation over distance, which means that there is no gradation of image, and consequently nothing resembling a photo.
2). It is not obvious that no form of photography was known until the 19th century. The production of images using a pin-hole (a camera obscurer) was well known before the 14th century, and experiments by by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,9 by Nicholas Allen,10 and by myself,11 have shown that some form of image capture is possible without the use of silver salts. I myself do not believe that any such discovery could have been kept secret for hundreds of years, but I think it is wrong to assert over-dogmatically that some form of photography could not have been a possible image-making mechanism.
So, with the discreditation of the Premises, the Conclusion is also discredited.
Moon’s next point is “Our medieval artist could not have conceived of 3D imagery, so they could not have known why they had to drape their picture over a three-dimensional figure to create the three-dimensional effect.” There are a number of assumptions built in here too, but I will simplify them to: Premise 1 – The Shroud image can be converted into a three dimensional body. Premise 2 – It is impossible to achieve this unintentionally. Premise 3 – A medieval artisan could not imagine any such correlation. Deduction – A medieval artisan did not create the Shroud.
More unpacking. Premise 1. Does this:
No, it doesn’t. They seem to depict the same person, but one is very flat, and the other looks more like a real human torso. This doesn’t negate Premise 1, but it does have a bearing on Premise 2 which claims that it is impossible to achieve such an image unintentionally. I disagree. Many rubbings of bas reliefs can, and have, achieved a very similar effect, and although it is true that they were not executed in ignorance, it is also true that no special techniques were required. Premise 3 then becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether the artisan thought in terms of a 3D image being produced or not. He could easily have created the Shroud image without any such consideration.
So, with the discreditation of the Premises, the Conclusion is also discredited.
Moon then goes on to modern attempts to reconstruct the Shroud. The syllogism here is at the usual one: if it hasn’t been copied, it must be impossible. I don’t accept that at all. The trouble is that very little is known about the chemical composition of the image, and the attempts by various members of STuRP such as John Heller, Alan Adler, Walter McCrone and Ray Rogers are incomplete and inconsistent. Those characteristics which anyone can verify for themselves, such as the pseudo-negative effect and the 3D effect are quite easy to imitate, but only if you use a bas relief: using a full 3D model is likely to be less successful, because of the Agamemnon mask effect, as has been shown many times. What’s more, the effects can be derived from any bas relief, not necessarily one of Christ. I’ve used bas reliefs of a bunch of fruit, and also a small Tibetan Dragon, with results that even Giulio Fanti considered “acceptable.”
I think Moon wanders off-course in supposing that all the researchers into the creation of the image “are dependent on computer technology.” I wonder what she means, and suspect that her logic is faulty here. Neither Joe Nicholl and his team, nor Garlaschelli, nor myself, used computer technology to make our images, but since our aim was to show that simple medieval technology could be used to create the same effect as the Shroud image, then obviously the technology used to observe that effect has to be used to confirm how successful we are, and it is not ‘cheating’ to refine our methods in order to make them more successful in that respect. Of course the medieval artisan didn’t need dozens of attempts; he was working to a different agenda and the effects that he never knew about were entirely co-incidental.
Moon is quite wrong In concluding that “Shroud sceptics are not imagining themselves back into the medieval mind and consequently they are expecting skills which would be inconceivable for medieval artists.” On the contrary, understanding the medieval mind is exactly what I, at least, have been determined to do, and thus to use skills and materials which I know medieval ‘artists’ not only conceived of, but actually did use in the course of their work. In sourcing comparable medieval bas reliefs, in demonstrating the variety of pigments and stains used, in providing appropriate motive (to prepare an illustrative simile for the Quem Quaeritis ceremony), means (ochre, egg-yolk, vinegar) and opportunity (a commission by the dean of a cathedral), and by producing a result which compares ‘acceptably’ to the Shroud, I have gone as far as is reasonably possible without a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of the microscopy of the Shroud.
In her last paragraph, Moon goes off the rails entirely.
“To conclude, a medieval forger cannot have anticipated the inventions and discoveries of the
last two hundred years: they could not have had the foresight. [They did not need to anticipate anything of the kind. It was wholly irrelevant to the task they set out to do.] They would not have made an image which is a photographic negative or one which has three-dimensional properties. [They could very easily have made an image which was both those things without even knowing.] A medieval oven required the use of wood, peat or coal, not electricity or gas. [Eh? Where did that come from? But so what? Does it matter how heat was achieved?] The idea that a fourteen-foot fire pit could be been created, where the heat remained consistent throughout, is absurd. [Nobody mentioned in Moon’s paper has suggested any such thing.] Apportioning to the medieval mind modern knowledge is as anachronistic as a wristwatch in the film Glory or a Starbucks cup in The Game of Thrones. [Nobody mentioned in Moon’s paper has suggested any such thing.] To understand what a medieval artist could have created, believers in the medieval Shroud need to abandon all modern technologies. [Nonsense. We use modern technology in order to help us understand what medieval people could have created].
To return to the beginning. Moon’s opening words ask “Could an artist have created the Shroud of Turin in the Middle Ages?” The answer, I contend, is “Most Certainly.”
====================
1). Pam Moon, ‘Medieval artists, Anachronisms and the Shroud of Turin,’ at academia.edu, 2022, and ‘The Shroud of Turin and Classic Invert on an iPhone,’ 2026.
2). An English paraphrase of a quotation in ‘De Boulogne à Austerlitz,’ Part 2, by Albert Sorel, part of Revue des Deux Mondes, published in 1903, with multiple more contemporary references. The actual quote reads, “Je ne me butais pas à plier les circonstances à mes idées. Je me laissais en général conduire par elles. Qui peut, à l’avance, répondre des circonstances fortuites, des accidens inopinés ? Que de fois j’ai donc dû changer essentiellement ! Ainsi ai-je vécu de vues générales, bien plus que de plans arrêtés.”
3). T.C. Newman, Follow the Light: The Shroud’s Revelations, 2013
4). Gilbert Lavoie, The Shroud of Jesus: And the Sign John Ingeniously Concealed, 2023
5). Nathan Wilson, ShadowShroud, shadowshroud.com/faq.htm#faq7
6). See, for example, Wikipedia, ‘Human Shadow Etched in Stone.’
7). Christophe Donnet et al., ‘2D Reproduction of the Face on the Turin Shroud by Infrared Femtosecond Pulse Laser Processing,’ Applied Optics, 2019
8). Paolo di Lazzaro et al., ‘Deep Ultraviolet Radiation Simulates the Turin Shroud Image,’ Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2010
9). Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, Turin Shroud: How Leonardo Da Vinci Fooled History, 2006
10). Nicholas Allen, Turin Shroud: Testament to a Lost Technology, 2017
11). Hugh Farey, ‘Letters to the Editor,’ Newsletter of the British Society for the Turin Shroud, 1995
Hi Otangelo,
Good of you to comment. I hope I made it clear that although inventing the kind of artist described in the first paragraph was an entertaining authenticist trope, my post was specifically in response to a request from Pam Moon to review her article, so that was what I did.
You invite me to read your list of “25 measurable constraints.” Is this a new one? Your list of evidences has changed so many times I have lost touch – and to be honest lost interest. And is it now definitive, or is it going to change in a week or two? Still, as a favour, let me read your account of Number One from your book, and see what I think.
“The body image is confined to the outermost 200 – 600 nanometres of the linen fibrils – a layer roughly one three-hundredth the width of a human hair, sitting on the very surface of individual flax fibres.”
[This corresponds to the primary cell wall, which some STuRP members think carries the image. Ray Rogers, however, thought the image resided on a thin layer of starch coating the fibres. Which one of these do you adhere to, and why do you think the highly qualified and experienced scientists examining the fibres disagreed?]
A nanometre is one-billionth of a metre. No known dyeing process, painting technique, or chemical transfer operates at this depth.
[Have you never seen plant cells under a microscope? There are numerous chemicals which can stain just the outer cell walls, and there are lots of photos of them on the internet. Also weak acids and even weak scorching will only affect the very outer surfaces.]
Scorching penetrates far deeper.
[That depends on how the scorch is applied. Light scorching can be seen on some of Mark Evans’ photos, stochastically affecting individual fibres.]
Liquids wick into the fibre by capillary action.
[No, of course they don’t. They do not penetrate the fibres at all. They may slip between the fibres, but not into them.]
…and any applied medium would leave residue detectable under microscopy. None has been found.
[Yes, it has. Micrographs by both McCrone, Nitowski and Kohlbeck all show numerous particles adhering to the fibres.
The image sits on the surface the way frost sits on a window pane: a coating so thin it has no weight.
[This is metaphor not science, but it sounds as if you are supporting Rogers here.]
This superficiality requirement alone is sufficient to rule out every form of painting, staining, dying, or contact transfer in the historical record.
[Obviously not.]
Microscopic examination adds a second blow. Paintings are made by strokes.
[Not at all. Many paintings are made by pressing paint onto the substrate.]
… and strokes have direction – even the most skilled rendering of a face, examined under magnification, reveals the movement of the artist’s hand.
[No, it doesn’t. Many watercolours, for example, show no brushstrokes at all, and neither do prints from etchings or lithography.]
The Shroud’s primary body image reveals no brushwork, no directionality, no evidence of any applicator moving across the surface.
[Yes. That’s because it wasn’t made with a brush or an applicator moving across the surface.]
The colouration appears uniform in every direction at every scale of examination.
[I’ve no idea what this means.]
No hand was here. No brush. No instrument of any kind that leaves a trace.
[The evidence produced so far does not rule out human manufacture.]
If you’ll forgive me, Otangelo, I won’t go on through the other 24. I note that you still think that all the coloured image fibres are the same, which clearly isn’t true, and that anatomical detail resolves at 5mm, which makes one wonder why no nipples or navel are visible, and that most of the Tier Three evidences simply say the same thing in different ways.
This isn’t science, Otangelo, it’s passion. And that’s fine, but to call it a challenge is wholly unjustified.
Best wishes,
Hugh
Hi, Otangelo,
I would take issue with your characterization of Hugh as a “careful thinker.” A better description is that he is a “clever thinker” who puts effort in pushing the narrative that the images on the Shroud of Turin are a medieval work of art. A “careful thinker” would not persist in asserting given the body of evidence that we have about these body images and the context that surrounds them.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hi, Hugh,
You close your essay with the following: “To return to the beginning. Moon’s opening words ask “Could an artist have created the Shroud of Turin in the Middle Ages?” The answer, I contend, is “Most Certainly.”
Eh? If you think that an artist could have “most certainly” created the Shroud of Turin in the Middle Ages, then why can’t anyone recreate an image with all of the Shroud’s special qualities today (especially when David Rolfe had presented a million dollar inducement to do so?) And, today, given our being aware of so many details concerning the images on the Shroud, a person nowadays has the advantage of trying to reverse-engineer every special feature of the Shroud’s images. Yet, still, nobody (not even you) can manage to replicate an image that presents with all of the special features that the Shroud of Turin’s images feature.
Regarding the photonegativity issue, you are correct that many people overstate the evidence (probably because they don’t know any better) and they claim that the Shroud’s images are a photonegative. But, you and I will agree that they are not. Instead, most–but not all–of the images on the cloth exhibit photonegative qualities. And, actually, this makes things even more interesting–because it precludes a simplistic process that can yield a total photonegative image. Instead, one has to wonder what could create a MOSTLY photonegative image AND where it is reasonable to think that someone would have done this. Let’s not forget about the necessity that reasonableness be included in the probabilities of something having happened (either intentionally or unintentionally.)
The situation with the hair is a great example of the photonegative aspect not appearing to be occurring. Some will argue that, perhaps, Jesus had all white hair. But, the Bible instructs that Jesus did not stand out in a crowd. At His age of crucifixion, most men do not have all (or nearly all) white hair.
So, once again, the complexity of things makes things far more challenging for the skeptic to explain but easier for the authenticist to explain. After all, the Shroud’s image have a very simple and elegant explanation that fits into the context of what both secular and non-secular historical records tell us about Jesus of Nazareth. The images on the Shroud of Turin must not be removed from the context that surrounds them–which is indicative of what created them–resurrection energy.
Best regards,
Teddi
Hugh, I appreciate the clarity and wit you bring to this debate. You are a careful thinker, and I do not dismiss your experimental work. But I must tell you plainly: your response to the constraint framework is not a refutation. It is a deflection dressed in reasonable language.
The full framework I am referring to throughout this response is publicly available and peer-referenced here: The Shroud of Turin: A Unified 25-Constraint Scientific Framework for Image-Formation Mechanism Evaluation. I invite you, and anyone following this exchange, to read it in full before concluding that the authenticist position has no rigorous scientific leg to stand on.
You are arguing against the wrong target
You spend considerable energy demolishing the “medieval magician” trope — the forger who needed prophetic knowledge of photography, 3D software, and pollen databases. I agree with you: that framing is rhetorical nonsense, and I do not use it. My framework does not ask whether a medieval artist could have known about these properties. It asks whether any known process — medieval or modern — can physically reproduce all 25 measurable constraints simultaneously. That is an entirely different question, and it is the one you consistently fail to answer.
Your chemistry is simply wrong for the Shroud
You propose ochre, egg-yolk, and vinegar. Hugh, Heller and Adler looked for exactly those kinds of materials in 1981 — iron oxides, protein media, organic binders — and found none in the body image. Rogers confirmed it. The image is chemically a product of cellulose oxidation confined to the crown surface of individual linen fibrils, at a depth of 0.2 to 0.6 micrometres. Your materials leave residues. They leave particles. They penetrate fibres. The Shroud image does none of these things. When the microscopy is examined under cross-section, the interior of the fibres is unmodified. Your method cannot produce that result — and you know it, because you yourself admit you cannot go further without better microscopic understanding. That admission is not a minor caveat. It is a concession that your technique has not been validated at the level where the critical evidence actually lives.
Your bas-relief argument proves less than you think
Yes, a rubbing from a bas-relief can produce a pseudo-negative effect and a rough approximation of 3D appearance. I do not deny that. But consider what the VP-8 analysis actually demonstrates: image brightness correlates quantitatively with cloth-to-body distance through air, not with contact pressure or surface texture. These are physically distinct quantities. A rubbing encodes mechanical contact force. The Shroud encodes spatial separation. No rubbing technique — however skillfully executed, however “acceptably” praised in a casual remark — has been shown to produce that specific mathematical relationship across the entire image with the coherence the VP-8 reconstruction requires. Show me the regression data from your bas-relief experiments. Show me the region-wise R² values. Until you can, you have demonstrated a visual resemblance, not a mechanistic equivalence.
You have not addressed the binary fibril response
This is perhaps the most devastating single constraint for your hypothesis, and I notice you do not mention it. Individual fibrils in the Shroud image are either fully coloured or entirely uncoloured. There are almost no intermediate states. This is the signature of a near-threshold reaction — something right at the boundary of a physical or chemical activation energy. Any contact method, any rubbing, any pigment application, any vapour diffusion produces graduated deposition. It is physically impossible for mechanical contact to produce binary all-or-nothing fibril responses distributed stochastically across a yarn bundle while leaving interior fibres completely unaffected. Your method produces gradual deposition. The Shroud does not. That is not a detail — it is a fundamental mechanistic incompatibility.
The blood evidence defeats your hypothesis independently
You barely mention the blood, Hugh, and I think I understand why — because it is where the forgery case collapses most completely. Here is what the evidence shows: the blood was deposited before the image formed. The image does not undercut the clot margins. The clot retraction rims and serum borders remain intact — meaning whatever process formed the image operated around pre-existing blood chemistry without disrupting it. Blood appears in UV fluorescence outside the body image boundaries entirely, meaning it was deposited independently of and prior to any image-forming event. The blood carries human-specific immunochemical markers — albumin, IgG — confirmed by immunofluorescence. And there is no putrefaction chemistry present, which tightly constrains the time window involved.
Now tell me: how does a medieval forger apply blood first, allow it to clot with intact retraction rims, and then produce a sub-micron cellulose oxidation image underneath that blood, using no heat, no pigment, no liquid medium, without disturbing any of it? Walk me through that process. Because I have been waiting for someone to do so, and no one has.
On replication
You say that because you produced an “acceptable” result, medieval manufacture is demonstrated. But Hugh, the standard you are applying is visual resemblance observed casually. The standard my framework applies is simultaneous satisfaction of 25 independently measurable, falsifiable physical constraints. Your method may satisfy three or four. It demonstrably fails on fibril chemistry, binary response, stochastic micro-selection, blood temporal integration, and the mathematical character of the distance encoding. A mechanism that satisfies some constraints while violating others is not a solution. It is a partial match — and in forensic science, a partial match is not an identification.
What I am actually asking
I am not asking you to accept the Shroud’s authenticity. I am asking you to engage honestly with the full weight of the physical evidence rather than focusing on the constraints your method can approximate while ignoring the ones it cannot. The 25-constraint framework exists precisely to prevent that kind of selective engagement. Every constraint is falsifiable. Every validation protocol is specified. If you believe my framework is wrong, identify which constraints are incorrectly formulated, show me the evidence, and I will revise them. That is how science works.
What I will not accept is the claim that a bas-relief, some ochre, and egg-yolk constitute an adequate explanation for an object whose fibril-level chemistry, binary microscopic response, pre-image blood integration, and quantitative 3D distance encoding remain unmatched by any known artificial process. The Shroud is not anomalous because of any single property. It is anomalous because all of these properties appear together, simultaneously, on one cloth — and your method reproduces none of them at the level where the measurement actually occurs.
That, Hugh, is the challenge.