The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [56]
“I’m not an expert on medieval painting,” Castle said, “but I’ve studied a lot of medieval paintings in Italian museums. The painter of the Renaissance who most studied anatomy was Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve spent hours examining his Adoration of the Magi at the Uffizi in Florence. There’s never been a question Leonardo was a genius and he used a sfumato style of painting in which he lightly created his images. Why isn’t Leonardo a candidate for having painted the Shroud?”
“He is a candidate,” Middagh admitted. “One problem is that Leonardo wasn’t born until 1452 and the Church can date the Shroud earlier than that, certainly to the fourteenth century. The documented provenance of the Shroud that we know is the linen cloth in Turin goes back to the 1350s, when a descendant of Geoffrey de Charney, the Knight Templar who was burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay, the famous last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, had the Shroud first displayed to the public at a local church in Lirey, France. In other words, we can trace the history of the Shroud of Turin to a date before Leonardo was born.”
Even that did not deter Castle. “There is one other possibility,” he said. “Maybe the Savoy royal family who owned the Shroud in Lirey and brought it from France to Turin in Italy asked Leonardo to reproduce the Shroud to replace an earlier shroud that was an obvious forgery. Knowing Leonardo’s expertise with human anatomy and the subtlety of his painting techniques, the Savoy family might have figured Leonardo’s replacement forgery would be more convincing than their original. Why can’t we assume Leonardo obtained a piece of linen made in the time frame of 1260 to 1390 A.D. that he thought would work? What if it turned out that Leonardo’s shroud was so superior that the Dukes of Savoy destroyed the Shroud of Lirey and replaced it with Leonardo’s duplicate? That would have allowed him to have been the artist in a theory consistent with the carbon-14-dating result.”
“I understand your point,” Middagh said, “but there are several problems, not the least of which is that we have no documentation historically that Leonardo ever worked in Turin or that he ever received a commission from the Savoy royal family.”
“But it’s an odd coincidence that the famous Leonardo self-portrait showing him as an old man with flowing hair down to his shoulders and a long beard ends up even today in Turin, one of the prize possessions of the Savoy family royal library in Turin,” Castle added.
“I too once suspected Leonardo as the painter of the Shroud,” Father Morelli interjected. “We also know Leonardo experimented with the camera obscura.”
“How would a camera obscura be involved?” Castle asked.
“The camera obscura was a primitive light box that involved an early lens,” Morelli explained. “The light box was constructed to capture through the lens an image from life that showed up upside down, with the top of the image showing up on the bottom, projected onto the back wall of the light box. The image could also be projected onto a cloth or canvas for painting. Leonardo also experimented with a wide variety of light-sensitive materials, including many wood resins and various tinctures made from plants and leaves.”
Middagh jumped in. “But the theory is not that Leonardo painted the Shroud. I can’t stress enough that the Shroud of Turin Research Project concluded in their 1981 final report that no pigments, paints, dyes, or stains were found on the Shroud’s fibers. Over a five-day period in 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project did a definitive scientific analysis of the Shroud, using X-ray fluorescence analysis, ultraviolet fluorescence photography, and infrared photography, as well as microphotography and microchemical analysis. Their findings that there was no paint of any kind on the Shroud