He was the ultimate Renaissance man – studying anatomy, designing a rudimentary helicopter and creating some of the most admired paintings of the age. But could Leonardo Da Vinci also have perpetrated history’s greatest art forgery? That’s the suggestion of one expert, who claims that Leonardo was responsible for faking the Turin Shroud.
The relic has inspired generations of pilgrims who have flocked to see what they believe is the face of the crucified Jesus. But it has also provoked bitter controversy after scientists carbon-dated it to the Middle Ages.
Now a US artist has entered the fray, putting forward her own theory about its origin. Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York, claims that the image is a self-portrait of Leonardo, which was made using a crude photographic technique. Using computer scans she found that the face on the Turin Shroud and a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci share the same dimensions. In the 1980s Miss Schwartz made detailed measurements of the Mona Lisa and a Leonardo self-portrait. To her amazement, the two faces lined up perfectly, leading her to suggest that he used a self-portrait as a model for the painting. Earlier this year she used the same technique to compare another Leonardo self-portrait with the Turin Shroud. “It matched. I’m excited about this,” she said.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the proportions that Leonardo wrote about were used in creating this Shroud’s face.”
A television documentary broadcast in Britain this week showed how Leonardo scorched his facial features on to the linen of the shroud using a sculpture of his face and an early photographic device called a camera obscura.
Even if it was authentic… Look around you, look at the world news and ask yourself, where is god today?
The program in the UK was Revealed, Season 2, Episode 2, and it has been posted on Usenet (the entity, not the dotcom). The episode title is “Da Vinci Shroud”.
Because the front and the back are different heights, and the head is too large for the body, they say that the technique involved the use of a camera obscura over several days. fwiw.
@peter_m
Where is god today? The same place he has always been … in the believers head. I would rather store something more useful in that head space … like recipes.
#8. sargasso said,
“visit Italy. It’ll all make sense”
I have..
I spent 2 months in ’85 driving my blazer
from Le Havre, France, down through Italy and hopped a 1.5 day ferry ride to Greece on up to
Mani to visit family.
had many opportunities to see why the madness of religion has prevailed. the shear size and beauty (and numbers) of religious structures of all sorts must have awestruck the plebes of the day that were lucky enough to lay eyes on them.
nonetheless, i still see religion, especially The Church, as the biggest money scandal and most harmful thought/concept to ever infect the minds of men & women alike.
never mind the control aspect of it.
even more insulting to humanity is that
people are fooled by it today, more than
ever
if one needs to follow an “enlightened path”
i think (in my somewhat uneducated view) the American Indians are the only humans on the planet that got spirituality right.
so i still affirm my original statement:
why do people still obsess over this nonsense?
-s