The Tiny World of Gérard Lucotte

In 2002, Professor Gérard Lucotte, Professor at the Paris School of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Anthropology and Molecular Genetics, was given a glass microscope slide bearing a tiny sliver of sticky tape, a narrow triangle about 1.360mm high and 0.614mm wide. It had been cut from a larger piece of tape, applied directly to the bloody ‘teardrop’ below the epsilon shaped mark on the brow of the frontal image of the Shroud, by Giovanni Riggi di Numana in 1978, in the sadly neglected Italian scientific investigation which took place before the STuRP got to work.

According to Lucotte, Riggi cut this tiny triangle out of a larger piece of tape because he wanted the Professor to try to identify a reddish particle he had spotted, but since then, Lucotte has trawled his electron microscope and nanoprobe over its surface, identifying a huge range of mineral, metal and biological particles.

To catch the true flavour of Lucotte’s work, here is the sliver in context.

A – The epsilon blood mark. The blue shape is the approximate position of the tape on the cloth, and the tiny triangle circled in red is the size of Lucotte’s little triangle. It is impossible to tell where exactly it came from on the tape.
B – The triangle under a microscope seen in transmitted light.
C – The triangle under a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The green oval marks the position of the red particle Riggi thought might be a blood corpuscle.
D – The sample with a 50µm grid superimposed, and Areas A to S defining particular groups of particles, the squares in each area being numbered from top to bottom and left to right. For clarity, here is Area A enlarged.

Lucotte and his team have observed about 2500 particles over the whole triangle, and seem to be engaged in an ever-extending period of detailed examination of every one. In seventeen papers so far, individual particles have been examined at magnifications of up to 10,000X, enabling point elemental analysis of extremely small areas. To give a flavour of the detail of his researches, here is Area A, again, with a few particles enumerated, of which particles 25 and 27 have been singled out for analysis (in the paper from which this image is taken).

The spectra of 25 and 27 are shown below:

Lucotte interprets these as follows: “The a25 particle is with pentagonal outlines and of 6.5 µm of size; its spectrum is that of a clay with an important mean peak of iron, and with phosphorous and sulphur traces. The a27 particle is a little (3 µm) rounded particle; its spectrum is also that of an illite, with an important mean peak of iron and with phosphorous and sulphur little peaks (it is contaminated by titanium).”

A particle in the bottom left of this sample (a41) is also analysed in this paper, and at the top, in a different paper, is the big bright particle (a5, only partially in the photo) which Riggi thought might be a blood cell:

Of a41, Lucotte says: “It is a pentagonal particle of 5.5 µm of size; its spectrum is that of a clay with an elevated mean peak of iron. It has an important peak of phosphorous and a little peak of sulphur.” And of a5, he says: “Several particles of red iron oxide (Fe₂O₃) were found on the sample. Figure 6 [the photo and corresponding spectrum above] shows one of them (located on the top A area), rounded in shape and with a diameter of approximately 10 µm; XRMF analysis establishes that it is mainly composed, on a substrate of clay minerals, of iron and of oxygen.”

That’s not to say that there is no blood in Lucotte’s little sample. In another paper he finds 25 “hematies” on his little triangle, by which he means corpuscles in varying stages of degradation. However, he is clear that they cannot account for the overall reddish colour of the sample, as only two of them actually looked reddish. A rather poor colour photo (perhaps taken with an ordinary camera) looks like this:

Lucotte’s analysis of the problem deserves to be quoted at length, although the translation is not very clear in some places and has been paraphrased where necessary.

“A very important question to resolve concerns the nature of red-brown colour. Figure 5 [above] shows a colour photograph of the triangle. On these photographs, taken in optical microscopy, the triangle appears as red-brown coloured. The enlarged photograph shows that this colour seems mainly concentrated on the particle groups located in the middle part of the triangle.

This colour of the sticky-tape triangle is the same as that of the corresponding blood spot (and that of the other blood spots of the face, and even of the rest of the body). Two alternative explanations have been given in the past to account for the red colour of the “blood stains.” The first was by Heller and Adler, who made desperate efforts to explain the red blood spots as a novel complex formed as a result of the trauma of crucifixion, proposing that it was a mixture of bilirubin and an exotic complex of oxidised met-hemoglobin, that they called ‘parahemic.’ The other was by McCrone and Skirius, mainly on the basis of polarized light microscopy studies, who proposed that this red-brown colour was mainly due to aggregates of crystalline particles of hematite (an iron-oxide mineral) and vermillion (a painting constituted of cinnabar mineral).

The recent results that we (Lucotte, Derouin and Thomasset, 2016) have obtained establish that neither red blood cells, nor hematite and cinnabar particles, can explain the whole observed red-brown colour of the triangle:
• Of the twenty-five red blood cells (or groups of red blood cells) we have observed, only two are of a red colour in optical microscopy.
• We have observed only two well-characterised particles of hematite and only one particle of cinnabar.

To explain the whole red-brown colour of the triangle, we are now studying now the elemental compositions and distributions of some yellow-red clays: goethite, montmorillonite, illite, and above all a special sort of phosphorite. They are very numerous on the surface of the triangle and, because of an iron oxide component, of yellow, red and red-brown colours.

In relationship to the painting process, we observe on the triangle numerous particles (almost all of non-red colour) of mineral pigments: ancient, such as calcite, chalk, lapis-lazuli, lead carbonate and zinc oxide, and modern, such as titanium dioxide, barium sulphate and cadmium sulfate. Also seven particles of red biotite (typically an industrial product), and several particles of red-brown ochres. Concerning particles of organic pigments we have some evidence of white and red colourings, several elongated flakes, and at least two voluminous adjacent traces of paint (orientated in the sense of the paint-brush hairs). All these datas will be interpreted further, with advice of specialists of pigments, colourings and painting.”

Sadly in the ten years since that was published little more interpretative progress has been made.

In one of his earlier papers, Lucotte characterised 1482 separate particles, dividing them into twelve categories, of which Minerals made up about 25% of the whole. In another, concentrating on minerals, he found that of the first 500 particles to be examined, 82% were minerals, which he broadly divided into Limestone, Silicates, Clays and Evaporites. Half the particles were clays.

The mineralogy of the Shroud may be diagnostic. Jerusalem and its environs consist geologically of a famously pure limestone, while northern France and the Low Countries are founded on sands and clays. The minerals identified by Lucotte and his collaborators are mostly sands and clays. There is hardly any limestone at all.

Another category is Metals, of which Lucotte has identified particles of gold, silver, brass, lead and titanium, including a cluster of a copper/gold alloy on Area A (a23). On the same tiny area there is also grain of pollen (a33) and a crumpled skin cell (a38), coccoliths (a10 and a36), a chip of marble (a34), a piece of glass (a42) and more clay (a13 and a14). Elsewhere he has identified a fragment of hair, a fragment of bone, and most recently granules of barium sulphate powder and broken spicules of microscopic marine radiolarians.

Ten pollen grains were found in all, of which seven were over-confidently identified to species level: three Ceratonia siliqua; two Myosotis ramosissima, and one each Balanites aegyptiaca and Cercis siliquastrum. Needless to say no other analysis of the flora of the Shroud has identified any of these.

Although they are not at all conclusive one way or another, I think Lucotte’s experiments deserve to be better known. They put into perspective the distinctly primitive microscopic observations (at 50X or so) of Heller and Adler, and call into question the more detailed (up to 400X) observations of Walter McCrone. The particles examined here are not ‘sub-micron’; Lucotte specifically refers to his 2500 observations as >1µm, but none of them was considered worth examining by the earlier researchers, who focussed entirely on what they could see clinging to the fibres of the cloth. Heller and Adler even went so far as to extract the fibres and wash everything else away. This little triangle contains no such fibres at all, although there are a few very tiny fragments of flax present among the debris.

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‘Optical and Chemical Characteristics of the Mineral Particles Found on the Face of the Turin Shroud,’
Gérard Lucotte, Scientific Research and Essays, 2012

‘Exploration of the Face of the Turin Shroud. Pollens Studied by SEM Analysis,’ Gérard Lucotte, Archaeological Discovery, 2015

‘Hematite, Biotite and Cinnabar on the Face of the Turin Shroud: Microscopy and SEM-EDX Analysis,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Derouin, Thierry Thomasset, Open Journal of Applied Sciences, 2016

‘Red Blood Cells on the Turin Shroud,’ Gérard Lucotte, Jacobs Journal of Hematology, 2016

‘Skin Debris on the Face of the Turin Shroud: A SEM-EDX Analysis,’ Gérard Lucotte, Archaeological Discovery, 2016

‘Scanning Electron Microscopic Characterization and Elemental Analysis of One Hair Located on the Face of the Turin Shroud,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Archaeological Discovery, 2017

‘An Osseous Remain on the Face of the Turin Shroud,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology, 2017

‘The Triangle Project,’ Gérard Lucotte, British Society for the Turin Shroud Newsletter, 2017

‘Gold and Silver Particles on the Turin Shroud, Studied by Scanning Electron Microscopy and Elemental Analysis,’ Gérard Lucotte, Archaeological Discovery, 2022

‘SEM-EDX Characterization of the Little Clays Particles Deposited on the Turin Shroud Surface,’ Gérard Lucotte, Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science and Technology, 2023

‘Lapis Lazuli Particles on the Turin Shroud: Microscopic Optical Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Archaeological Discovery, 2023

‘Iron-Rich Red Clays on the Turin Shroud: Optical Microscopy Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Thierry Deroin, Archaeological Discovery, 2024

‘Optical Microscopy and SEM-EDX Characterization of some Little Micro-Organisms Having Chemical Formulas Similar To Those Of Clays Deposited On The Turin Shroud Surface, Gérard Lucotte, Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science and Technology, 2024

‘Brass Particles on the Turin Shroud: Optical Microscopy Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, International Journal of Sciences, 2024

‘White Particles on the Turin Shroud: Optical Microscopy Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Stéphan Borensztajn, Archaeological Discovery, 2025

‘Barium Sulphate as a White Pigment on the Turin Shroud: Optical Microscopy Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science and Technology, 2025

‘Radiolarians on the Turin Shroud: Optical Microscopy Studies and SEM-EDX Analyses,’ Gérard Lucotte, Thierry Thomasset, Journal of Multidisciplinary Engineering Science and Technology, 2026