Scholar of the Strange and Mysterious
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Professor Hex
Scholar of the Strange and Mysterious
Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting



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Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Second Face on the Shroud of Turin 
Weird Writer's post on the second face on the Shroud of Turin got me thinking about other possible candidates for the image. Aside from the obvious, both Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques de Molay have been mentioned as possible models for the Shroud.

Da Vinci, the great artist and inventor, seems a likely proposition as the Shroud first appeared not far from his home and the face is strikingly similar to a known self-portrait. The theory, expounded convincingly in Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? argues that Leonardo created the image using an early form of photography involving a camera obscura. This is not as unrealistic as it first sounds. Painters have long used optics in their work, according to David Hockney and his wonderful book, Secret Knowledge. These optics include the camera obscura, mentioned above, as well as the camera lucida. Roger Bacon wrote of optical theory in the 1200s and Da Vinci's notebooks prove that he was familar with the camera obscura and the properties of optics.

The speculation that Jacques de Molay might be the image on the Shroud comes from the book Second Messiah: Templars, the Turin Shroud and the Great Secret of Freemasonry by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas.

De Molay, last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was tortured and burned to death by King Philip the Fair of France after Philip decimated the French Templars in an effort to seize their lands for himself and Pope Clement V. This theory speculates that the image was an after-effect of torture created by sweat and chemicals released from the body.

For my money, I'd stick with Leonardo. But assuming the primitive photography hypothesis is accurate, it still begs the question: where did the second face come from? The world's first photo assistant?


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