The Ridiculous Picknett and Prince Photograph Theory
When Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince get into the news, as they have recently with their new book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups about the Life of Jesus, invariably new discussion arises about their proposal that Leonardo da Vinci created the image on the shroud using a medieval proto-camera.
Historian Dan Scavone comments on the Picknett and Prince argument that the image was made using a magic lantern, a simple projector, and light-sensitive chromium salts in an egg white medium.
The argument that history’s proto-photo was a life- sized photo(!) on a fourteen-foot cloth(!) that was a composite(!): double corpse with daubed-on blood and, in separate processes, Leonardo’s own head front and back, is a priori far-fetched. The premise is more demanding of faith than is the authenticity of the Shroud. I am led to ask why Leonardo has left us his self-portrait in red chalk and not his photo, and why he would use another body when Vasari notes that his own physique was near-perfect, and everybody knows his exorbitant vanity.
Scavone also writes:
This question leads the authors to another assertion: Leonardo was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which esteemed John the Baptist over Jesus. Therefore, the apparent disembodied head visible on the Shroud man was Leonardo’s cipher for the decapitated Baptist. Leonardo’s use of his own photo, they argue, was owing to his inordinate vanity, the same that prompted him to encode his own face in his famous portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco de Giocondo. This theory was confirmed by Lillian Schwartz of Bell Laboratories and Dr. Digby Quested of London, who discovered that it matched up perfectly with the major lines of Leonardo’s face in the above-mentioned self-portrait at age sixty. Picknett writes “Leonardo was capable of subtly building his own image into that of his masterpieces; if he had done so with the Mona Lisa, why not with the Shroud?”
There is also plenty of evidence from science that demonstrates that this is not a photograph. Were it, it would not produce a 3D image. A photograph contains only reflective light data. It does not contain spatial data.
After reading this article I can´t help making some comments about Picknett and Prince´s ridiulous theory about the Shroud image.
1- Everybody knows that the first Shroud display in western Europe was in 1356 in a Lirey church in France ; Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 .
How could he make such an artifact before even beiing born?
The theory that Duke Louis of Savoy later ordered him to make a more perfect Shroud is preposterous.
2- Their theory deals with a lot of inaccuracies , just to mention:
If the photographic emulsion had egg Shroud image fibers shoud test positive for proteins- that doesn´t happen and the late chemist Raymond Rogers submited image fibers to Pyrolysis Mass Spectrometry which discarded nitrogenous residues.
There were no refrigerators at that time so the tortured and flogged bodies Leonardo «got» would have rotten before such images formed on the cloth.
The face of the Man of the Shroud has the features of a
semitic man- that´s the opinion of anthropologic experts ; Leonardo was an italian.
2- The image of the Shroud is not a photograph
Photographs reult from reflected light and from analysis of highlights and shadows an image expert can infer light direction.
In the Shroud image there is no light directionality it just seems that the light or whatever made the image comes from the body itself !
A face in a photograph has sharp contours ; the face of the Man of the Shroud has no distinct boundaries fading into colorless areas.
Photographic image of a body is always an «albedo » image it don´t has 3D encoded data unveiled by a VP-8 scan .
How can these authors explain that it was possible to produce an hologram from such a photograph?
It´s not possible to obtain Holograms from 2D images as Dr Petrus Soons states and the hologram of the Man of the Shroud had missing data that produced hole-like defects explained by the israeli botanist expert Professor Avinoam Danim as places where flowers were laid over the body !
They don´t deal either with the fact that underneath blood stains there is no image. EXPLAIN ALL THIS STUFF Ms Picknett and Mr. Prince !!!
If you want to read a detailed explanation just go to Barrie Schwortz´s wonderful website ( http://www.shroud.com ) and search scientific papers his article « Is the Shroud of Turin a Medieval Photograph? »
Some years ago, before getting interested in Shroud studies I bought their book Templar Revelation but soon I realized that their claims were absolutely ludicrous and I didn´t finish it and it is still in my bookshelf.
It´s just time waste to read such books.
greetings
Maria da Glória
Maria da Glória Gonçalves Barroso
October 23, 2008 at 10:00 pm