The journal Archaeometry, which had in the past featured a hypothesis of Brazilian researcher Moraes regarding the origin of the Shroud of Turin, publishes a rebuttal by specialists Casabianca, Marinelli, and Piana.
Vatican News
Last summer news regarding studies of the Shroud of Turin reported on Brazilian researcher Cicero Moraes who proposed a digital reconstruction of the image of the Shroud that supported a hypothesis that it was created in the Middle Ages using a bas-relief. A response recently published in Archaeometry challenges the validity of Moraes’s claims point by point.
Three specialists on the Shroud of Turin, Tristan Casabianca, Emanuela Marinelli, and Alessandro Piana, criticized this study, which they say rests on ambiguous objectives, methodological flaws, and faulty reasoning. In doing so, they confirm the criticism already expressed last summer by the Archbishop of Turin and Custodian of the Shroud, Cardinal Roberto Repole, and by the International Center for Shroud Studies of Turin (CISS). What deserves special emphasis, and this is the news of recent days, is the importance of their critique being published in the very same academic journal in which Moraes’s original article had appeared.
The ongoing debate
The debate over the authenticity of the Shroud has always been lively, ever since the first photograph taken in 1898 by photographer Secondo Pia. Today the controversy continues primarily in international academic journals. In 2019, the famous carbon-14 dating (1260–1390 AD), published in Nature in 1989, was called into question by a new analysis of the raw data published precisely in Archaeometry, a journal associated with the Oxford laboratory that had taken part in the original dating.
Last summer, in the same journal, Brazilian researcher Cicero Moraes published an article supporting the medieval forgery thesis. According to him, a bas-relief produces a type of contact that seems to correspond better to the contours visible on the Shroud than does the volume of a human body. From this he drew an argument in favor of a medieval artistic origin. From the moment of publication, however, Moraes’s article raised numerous doubts among specialists. In his statement, Cardinal Repole criticized the “concern about the superficiality of certain conclusions, which often do not hold up to a closer examination of the work presented.”
Flaws in Moraes’s analysis
After the media attention subsided, the commentary just published in Archaeometry by Tristan Casabianca, Emanuela Marinelli, and Alessandro Piana fully confirms the legitimacy of that initial criticism. The authors highlight numerous flaws in Moraes’s analysis: anatomically deficient modeling, since it reproduces only the frontal image, reverses right and left in both the feet and the hands, and arbitrarily chooses a height (180 cm) outside the accepted consensus (173–177 cm); repeated use of vague terms to assert similarity without ever providing precise measurements; the choice of a single image, the 1931 photograph, despite the existence of much more recent ones. Moreover, the modeling was simulated not on linen but on cotton.
Even more troubling, Moraes’s 3D modeling overlooks the principal specific features of the Shroud: the extreme superficiality of the image (a depth of one-fifth of a thousandth of a millimeter) and the multiple independent confirmations of the presence of blood, which are incompatible with any medieval artistic practice. The authors therefore question the real value of a model that does not faithfully reproduce the anatomical characteristics of the Man of the Shroud and that ignores its most significant physicochemical properties. Moraes’s study also neglects the fact that several variants of the bas-relief hypothesis had already been examined and rejected in the early 1980s in academic journals. It likewise overlooks that the issue of anatomical deformation of a body onto a cloth had already been thoroughly examined as early as 1902 by the French scientist Paul Vignon.
Weak historical foundations
According to the commentators, the historical foundations of the initial study also appear weak. Moraes has to draw on periods and places with no connection to one another to explain how an artist or forger could have intellectually conceived and in practice produced that unique image of a naked Christ, shown front and back, in a post-crucifixion scene. But, as Casabianca, Marinelli, and Piana point out, this amounts to a fallacy of composition, an explanatory method that, if generalized, would undermine the very foundations of art history. The image is so far outside the traditional artistic framework that the main historian on whom Moraes relies, William S. A. Dale, was convinced that it could not have been created in 14th-century France, but rather in the Byzantine period, at least 200 years earlier and 2,000 kilometers away from Champagne.
In his reply to these criticisms, also published by the journal, Moraes maintains his conclusions but specifies that his article offers a “strictly methodological” perspective, focused on evaluating morphological deformation within the framework of projecting a body onto a cloth. Moraes nevertheless steps outside this methodological framework to evoke four artistic works from the 11th to the 14th century that might have inspired the creator of the Shroud. However, none of them depicts a naked Christ in a post-crucifixion scene, and therefore none can explain the appearance of the image in a small French village in the mid-14th century.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Man of the Shroud has given rise to countless questions and scientific investigations. This latest academic controversy shows that while modern tools, including digital ones, can enrich our knowledge, extrapolations about the origin of an object as singular as the Shroud require particular rigor, both methodologically and historically.