The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [57]
“So why did you consider Leonardo a candidate?” Castle asked Morelli.
“The dates of the first known exhibitions of the Shroud in Lirey do rule out Leonardo,” Morelli said. “But the most interesting theory is that Leonardo created the first photographic image when he produced the Shroud. The idea is that Leonardo may have coated the linen with a light-sensitive chemical mixture and projected the image onto the linen using a camera obscura. Books have been written arguing that the face of the man in the Shroud resembles images we have of Leonardo—most importantly the Leonardo self-portrait that is kept at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. There have been a few books claiming that Leonardo used himself as the face in creating the Shroud as a photographic image. In other words, the authors argued that what we have in the Shroud is not the image of Jesus Christ, but a photographic image of Leonardo da Vinci.”
“You reject that theory now?” Castle asked.
“I do,” Morelli said. “There is no evidence in any of Leonardo’s existing codex manuscripts that indicate he experimented with photography. He writes extensively about using a camera obscura, but as far as I can figure out, Leonardo used the camera obscura to assist him in his drawing and painting. None of Leonardo’s existing notebooks discuss any experimentation with plants or chemicals to produce light-sensitive formulas.”
“Aren’t some of Leonardo’s codex notebooks missing?” Castle asked.
“Yes,” Morelli said. “But there is no corroborating evidence from anything written in Leonardo’s lifetime that he came up with anything resembling photography. No image survives from the fifteenth century that even remotely resembles photography. The modern attempts to produce a Shroud-like image by photographic methods that would have possibly been known in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries look crude, nothing like the Shroud. But still, the most important problem is that the dates don’t work. No matter how you look at it, Leonardo was born after we can document that the Shroud had been exhibited at Lirey in France, and photography wasn’t invented until about two hundred years ago.”
“There’s one more important piece of evidence,” Middagh added.
“What’s that?”
“There’s human blood hemoglobin and blood serum on the Shroud, and the blood serum is only evident in ultraviolet fluorescence,” Middagh said. “There is no way any artist in medieval times could have used ultraviolet fluorescence to paint human blood serum on the Shroud so it could be discovered centuries later, when UV fluorescence was invented. Besides, how would an artist paint blood serum that is invisible to the eye on specific places on the Shroud? Medical doctors examining the Shroud confirm the blood found on the Shroud, including the blood serum, is exactly where they would expect to find blood traces if the wounds displayed on the body of the man in the Shroud came from a crucifixion.”
Castle, a medical doctor with extensive surgical experience, wanted to know more about the blood detected on the Shroud. “How exactly does the blood appear on the Shroud? Does the blood appear only on the top fibrils, as does the image of the body? Or does the blood saturate the Shroud?”
“Most of the blood we observe on the Shroud comes from direct contact the linen had with the body,” Middagh answered. “The most prominent bloodstains appear as solid stains, for instance the blood streaming from the wrist wounds or the blood on the forehead from what would have been the crown of thorns. These bloodstains penetrate the Shroud, and so on the frontal image, the bloodstains from the crown of thorns show up on the part of the cloth resting on the body and bleed through to the top of the cloth. The same is the case with the dorsal image. Pools of blood resulting from direct contact with the body do saturate the Shroud. Even more interesting, the Shroud of Turin Research Project found that the bloodstains on the Shroud are composed of hemoglobin with high concentrations of bilirubin, which would suggest blood