The Shroud of Turin

The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth about 4.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, woven in a herringbone twill. On it is a faint, straw-coloured image of the front and back of a naked man, laid out as if the cloth had been folded over his head. The figure bears marks corresponding to the crucifixion described in the Gospels: wounds at the wrists and feet, a wound in the side, signs of scourging and of something pressed onto the head. Many Christians venerate it as the burial cloth of Jesus.

Its documented history begins in the 1350s at Lirey, in Champagne, where the knight Geoffroi de Charny had founded a collegiate church. A lead pilgrim badge from about this time, now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, shows the cloth together with the Charny arms. In 1389 Pierre d’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, wrote a memorandum to the Avignon pope Clement VII claiming that one of his predecessors had investigated the cloth decades earlier and identified the artist who painted it. Clement allowed the exhibitions to continue, provided it was announced that the cloth was a representation and not the true shroud.

In 1453 Marguerite de Charny transferred it to Duke Louis of Savoy. It was damaged by fire in the chapel at Chambéry in 1532, when molten silver burned through the folded layers, and Poor Clare nuns sewed patches over the holes in 1534. The House of Savoy moved it to Turin in 1578. On his death in 1983 the former king Umberto II bequeathed it to the Holy See, and it is kept in Turin Cathedral.

Modern interest began in 1898, when the photographer Secondo Pia found that his negative plates showed the image as a clear positive, which suggested to many that the cloth itself behaves like a photographic negative. In 1978 the American Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) examined it for five days; its members reported that the image lies only on the topmost fibres and that paint was not its main cause. The microscopist Walter McCrone, studying sticky-tape samples from the same examination, concluded instead that it was painted with iron oxide and vermilion. How the image was formed is still disputed.

In 1988, with Church approval, a strip from one corner was divided between laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona. Their results, published in the journal Nature in 1989, dated the linen to between 1260 and 1390 CE with 95 per cent confidence, which fits strikingly well with the first documentary records. Most scientists and historians accept this as strong evidence of a medieval origin.

Defenders of authenticity have challenged the result, arguing that the sample came from a repaired area, that the 1532 fire or later contamination altered the carbon, or, in a 2019 statistical reanalysis of the raw data, that the samples were not uniform. The laboratories and many specialists reply that textile experts examined the sampling site before it was cut, and that no proposed effect has been shown to be large enough to shift the date by some thirteen centuries. The Catholic Church has made no official pronouncement; in 1998 Pope John Paul II said that the Church has no specific competence to decide such questions and leaves them to scientists.

For believers, the Shroud is a focus of prayer rather than a laboratory specimen. Its rare public exhibitions, called ostensions, draw pilgrims in their millions, as they did in 2010 and 2015, and in 2020, during the pandemic, it was shown in a televised and streamed prayer service. Recent popes have spoken of it as an icon of Christ’s suffering, inviting reflection whatever one concludes about its age.

The Shroud belongs to a wider family of cloths said to preserve the features of Christ, such as the Veil of Veronica and the Mandylion of Edessa. Some authors have argued that the Shroud and the Mandylion are one and the same, which would give it a history long before Lirey. Historians generally find this unproven, because the sources describe the Mandylion as the image of a face on a small cloth.

The debate has produced a field of study of its own, sometimes called sindonology, from the Greek sindon, the word the Gospels use for the linen in which Jesus was wrapped. Exhibitions, documentaries and experimental replicas made with medieval materials keep public curiosity alive. For many visitors the Shroud is a place where faith, history and science meet, and where respectful disagreement continues.