The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [20]
“When did the Church discover the photographic qualities of the Shroud?”
“It wasn’t until 1898, when Secondo Pia, an Italian amateur photographer, was allowed to photograph the Shroud. Working with his negatives in the darkroom, Secondo Pia was shocked when he realized his negative had produced a face. He said he felt that in his darkroom he was looking back centuries, the first person since Christ died to be looking into the living face of the Lord. Pia realized that the image of the man on the Shroud became easier to see when the light values are reversed, such that the brownish red lines on the Shroud show up as highlights in the photographic negative. In other words, the image of the crucified man that is somehow imprinted into the linen of the Shroud is most clearly seen when the brownish red lines that your eye sees as the image on the Shroud are reversed to white in the photographic negative.”
“So what I am looking at here is the negative that results when a photograph of the Shroud is taken, is that correct?” Castle asked, wanting to make sure he understood what Morelli was attempting to explain.
“That’s right,” Morelli said. “You’re looking at a photographic negative. The brownish red lines visible to the naked eye on the Shroud show up in a photographic negative as white highlights. You can easily imagine that Secondo Pia’s contemporaries in the late 1890s accused him of having perpetrated a fraud. They claimed he concocted the image of Jesus Christ that you are looking at, using darkroom tricks to produce an image that was not visible to the naked eye looking at the Shroud. Pia’s results weren’t accepted until 1931, when Giuseppe Enrie, an Italian professional photographer, was permitted to photograph the Shroud a second time and got the same results.”
From his briefcase, Morelli handed Castle a second image of the face of the man in the Shroud. “Take a look at this image and compare it with the other. I think comparing the two will give you a better idea how the process works. This is what a photographic print of the Shroud looks like. The actual Shroud looks much the same, except that the lines that mark the face would be brownish red, not the black and white of the photographic print you see here.”
Castle looked back and forth between the two images, appreciating how Secondo Pia’s photographic process had worked.
“What you are looking at now in the photographic print is how the face of the man appears on the linen of the Shroud to the naked eye,” Morelli explained. “Looking at the Shroud with your naked eye, the face of the man in the Shroud looks faint—so faint that at first you might not even see him. But then, after you study the image for a while, the face becomes clearer, as you begin to be able to see and distinguish the brownish red lines that appear on the surface.”
“So you’re telling me that whoever painted the Shroud painted a negative?” Castle asked.
“Yes,” Morelli said, pleased to see Castle was getting the point. “That’s exactly what I am saying. In other words, if you assume some medieval painter forged the Shroud, that painter would have had to be brilliant enough to understand how photographic negatives work, even though they hadn’t been invented yet. Why wouldn’t a medieval forger simply have painted a positive image onto the burial cloth, the way a painter portrays a life scene the way the eye sees it? Nobody in the Middle Ages had ever seen a photographic negative.”
“But not all photographs require a negative,” Castle observed. “Daguerreotypes are one of the earliest forms of photographs and they don’t require a negative as an intermediary step in the photographic process. If I am right, in a daguerreotype, a positive image is formed directly on a plate that is coated with light-sensitive chemicals.”
“You are exactly right,” Morelli said. “Negatives are only used in photographic processes where the image is imprinted first on an intermediary surface that has been treated with photosensitive chemicals, like