The Shroud of X

In the spring of 2010, more than two million people filed through Turin Cathedral to look at a piece of linen. They had booked timed tickets months in advance. Many had traveled from other countries. Some waited hours in line for a viewing that, once they reached the front of the queue, lasted less than a minute. What they saw, when they finally stood before the reinforced glass case, tended to surprise them. Photographs of the object are sharp, dramatic, unmistakably a human figure, front and back, with the wounds of a beating and a crucifixion rendered in reddish-brown against pale cloth. The object itself, seen with the naked eye from a respectful distance, is much fainter than that. Visitors have described it for more than a century in similar terms: subtle, ghostly, almost disappointing up close, a watermark more than a photograph. The image resolves at a distance and blurs on approach. It behaves, in other words, exactly backward from how an ordinary picture behaves.

That single fact is a reasonable place to start a book, because it is already stranger than it looks. Most of what makes the Shroud of Turin famous is not the cloth itself but a photograph of the cloth. In May of 1898, an amateur photographer and city councilman named Secondo Pia was granted rare permission to photograph the shroud during a public exposition marking the wedding of the future King Victor Emmanuel III. Working at night, under the primitive lighting conditions of the era, with long exposures and cumbersome glass plates, Pia developed his negatives in a makeshift darkroom and found something he had not expected and could not immediately explain: the negative plate, when he looked at it directly, showed a coherent, almost photographic human face and body, with a clarity and three-dimensional plausibility the cloth itself did not display to the naked eye. Pia's own account describes nearly dropping the plate in the developing tray. Within days, newspapers in Turin and then across Europe were reporting the discovery, and the reaction split along a line this chapter is about to describe in more general terms: some readers took the photographic negative as a startling confirmation of something they already believed, others immediately suspected Pia of manipulating his plates, and a formal technical inquiry was convened within the year to determine whether the effect was genuine or an artifact of nineteenth-century photographic chemistry. The inquiry concluded the photographs were authentic. It did not, and could not, settle what the underlying image meant, and it did not stop the argument; it simply gave the argument, for the first time, a piece of hard technical evidence that both sides would go on interpreting in opposite directions for the next century. The details of Pia's 1898 exposure are established well beyond dispute; what is not established, and will not be settled in these pages before its time, is what to make of the image his negative revealed. That is the whole difficulty of this object in one sentence: it does something unexpected, and the unexpectedness itself becomes the first fact anyone has to reckon with, before any theory of authenticity, fraud, chemistry, or theology has entered the room.