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Channel
Turin
Shroud Back Side Shows Face
By
Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News
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April
11, 2004 — The ghostly image of a man's face has emerged
on the back side of the Turin Shroud, the piece of linen long
believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the
crucifixion, according to new digital imaging processing techniques.
The discovery adds new complexity to one of the most controversial
relics in Christendom, venerated by many Catholics as the
proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed
by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake.
The study, which will be published on Tuesday by one of the
journals of the Institute of Physics, the Journal of Optics
A: Pure and Applied Optics, examined the back surface of the
famous handwoven linen.
The front side of the shroud, on which the smudged outline
of the body of a man is indelibly impressed, has been investigated
by a multitude of scientists. But the reverse side has remained
hidden for centuries beneath a piece of Holland cloth that
was sewn by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts
of it.
The cloth's back surface was fully scrutinized only in 2002,
when the 14-foot-long linen was completely unstitched from
the Holland cloth during a restoration project.
To the naked eye, the back surface of the shroud showed almost
nothing, apart from a peculiar stitching which Mechtild Flury-Lemberg,
the Swiss textile expert who performed the restoration work,
identified as a style seen in the first century A.D. or before.
The back surface, however, was photographed in detail and
the pictures published in a book by Mons. Giuseppe Ghiberti,
one of the church's top Shroud officials. At the end of the
restoration, a new reinforcing cloth was sewn back in place,
hiding again the shroud's reverse side.
"As I saw the pictures in the book, I was caught by the
perception of a faint image on the back surface of the shroud.
I thought that perhaps there was much more that wasn't visible
to the naked eye," Giulio Fanti, professor of Mechanical
and Thermic Measurements at Padua University and main author
of the study, told Discovery News.
Using sophisticated image processing based on direct and inverse
Fourier transform, enhancement and template-matching techniques
on Ghiberti's pictures, Fanti uncovered the image of a man's
face.
Lying behind the known image of the bearded man bearing the
marks of crucifixion, the new image has striking three-dimensional
quality and matches in form, size and position the known face.
"Though the image is very faint, features such as nose,
eyes, hair, beard and moustache are clearly visible. There
are some slight differences with the known face. For example,
the nose on the reverse side shows the same extension of both
nostrils, unlike the front side, in which the right nostril
is less evident," Fanti said.
However, the enhancing procedure did not uncover the full
body image as it appears on the front side.
"If it does exist, it is masked by the noise of the digital
image itself. But we found what it is probably the image of
the hands," Fanti said.
The presence of a face on both sides of the shroud would seem
an obvious feature in case of a fake: when making a print
onto a cloth, paint soaks the cloth's fibers reaching also
the back side.
"This is not the case of the Shroud. On both sides, the
face image is superficial, involving only the outermost linen
fibers. When a cross-section of the fabric is made, one extremely
superficial image appears above and one below, but there is
nothing in the middle. It is extremely difficult to make a
fake with these features," Fanti said.
According to the scientist, this double superficiality could
be crucial to answer the central, unanswered question of how
the image of that man got onto the cloth.
Shroud History
Scientific interest in linen cloth began in 1898, when it
was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pia. The negatives revealed
the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and
a bloodstained head.
In 1988, the Vatican approved carbon-dating tests. Three reputable
laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Ariz., concluded
that the Shroud was medieval, dating from 1260 to 1390, and
not a burial cloth wrapped around the body of Christ.
But since then a growing sense that the radiocarbon dating
might have had substantial flaws has emerged among shroud
scholars.
Fanti's finding matches a hypothesis postulated in 1990 by
John Jackson, an American physicist who conducted the first
major investigation into the shroud in 1978. Jackson speculated
the presence of a faint image on the back surface of the shroud,
only in correspondence to the frontal image.
The history of the cloth has been steeped in mystery. It has
survived several blazes since its existence was first recorded
in France in 1357, including a mysterious fire at Turin Cathedral
in 1997.
Kept rolled up in a silver casket, it has been on display
only five times in the past century. When it last went on
display in 2000, more than three million people saw it. The
next display will be in 2025.
Picture(s): Courtesy of Giulio Fanti
Back of the Shroud
In this processed image of the back of the shroud, a man's
face can be seen. To get to the image, experts used sophisticated
image processing, enhancement and template-matching techniques
on pictures of the shroud.
The front of the shroud appears next (left) to the back for
comparison.
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PhysicsWeb
Reversal
of fortune for Turin Shroud
Belle Dumé
13 April
2004
Italian
scientists have discovered that the back of the Turin Shroud
has the image of a man's face - and possibly his hands - impressed
upon it. Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolio of Padova University
used various image-processing techniques to enhance the faint
features that can be seen in photographs of the Shroud (J.
Opt. A6 491). This is the first time the reverse side of the
controversial relic has ever been studied.
Figure 1
(a)The
image of the face of a man, on the front surface of the Turin
Shroud, as it appears to observers. The characteristic E-shaped
bloodstain on the front is shown for reference. (b) The mirror
image of (a), with inverted luminance levels. The reference
bloodstain takes on the shape of the number 3.
(Image and text J. Opt. A6 491)
The
Turin Shroud is a piece of linen, some 4.4 metres long and
1.1 metres wide, that contains images of the body and face
of a man. The Shroud is believed by many to be the cloth Jesus
was wrapped in before being buried. Although the front of
the Shroud has been extensively studied, its back has remained
hidden beneath another piece of linen, which was sewn on by
nuns to cover up damage caused by a fire in 1532. However,
this protective layer was removed in 2002, allowing the back
of the cloth to be photographed.
Fanti
and Maggiolo have now studied these photographs, together
with others taken at various times since the 1930s. Because
the images are extremely faint, the duo has used an array
of image-processing techniques -- including Gaussian filters,
Fourier transforms and template matching -- to highlight human
features.
Figure 2
(a)
A detail of the face, acquired by Enrie in 1933, after fast
Fourier transform filtering of the whole image. (b) The same
detail as in (a), filtered by means of windowing: the moustache
appears clearly resolved and realistic.
(Image and text J. Opt. A6 491)
They
found that the face of the man that can be seen on the reverse
of the Shroud matches that observed on the front. The image
shows faint details of a nose, eyes, hair, beard and moustache
(figures 2 and 3). The Italian duo was also able to make out
weak images of the man's hands, but could not produce images
of his shoulders or back.
Figure 3
(a)
and (b) A processed face image, front surface and back surface
(taken by Ghiberti in 2002), showing similar body features,
comparison of which may help in understanding the mechanism
of formation of the body image.
(Image and text J. Opt. A6 491)
These
new findings could help to shed light on the origins of the
cloth but are more likely to fuel further debate over it.
In 1979, carbon-dating techniques revealed that the Shroud
dated from medieval times and therefore could not have been
used to bury Christ. However, many scientists have argued
that the carbon-dating techniques used to study the Shroud
were flawed.
Fanti
and Maggiolo are now saying that the Shroud is unlikely to
be a fraud because the image of the face is superficial on
both sides of the cloth and only involves the topmost fibres
of the material. "It is extremely difficult to make a
fake with these features," says Fanti.
Author
Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb
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