For centuries, the Shroud of Turin has been the world’s most mysterious holy selfie. It’s a ghostly linen cloth with the faint imprint of a man who suspiciously looks like the most stereotypical depiction of Jesus one could conjure up.
First popping up in France around 1354, it has been hailed by some Christians as the burial cloth of Christ himself. Meanwhile, skeptics have been calling it a fake for centuries.
Now, a Brazilian 3D designer who specializes in historical facial reconstructions, Cícero Moraes, used free, open-source tools to simulate how a cloth would drape over either a real human or a sculpture.
Publishing his findings in the journal Archaeometry, he concluded that the Shroud’s imprint doesn’t behave like something that was wrapped around an actual body. It’s more like a lo-fi ancient stamp.
Shroud of Turin Image Probably Didn’t Come From Jesus’ Body
When Moraes simulated a sheet draped over a real human form, the resulting image appeared warped and stretched, much like trying to flatten a globe into a map. This distortion is known as the “Agamemnon Mask effect,” referencing that time archaeologists flattened a gold funerary mask and ended up with a squashed face.
The Shroud, however, doesn’t show that kind of stretching.
Instead, Moraes’ low-relief sculpture theory proposes that the image was created by laying a cloth over a raised but mostly flat form, and then treated with pigment or a browning agent to leave an imprint.
His digital reconstruction shows a much better alignment between the cloth’s contours and the image on the Shroud. According to Moraes, this suggests that the artifact does not have divine origins. Origins are firmly rooted in artistic technique. Meaning that the imprint isn’t of Jesus, nor is it of anyone who never actually lived. It is, essentially, a stamp.
None of this is for sure, of course. The shroud still holds tremendous religious meaning to many, acting as something akin to “proof” that Jesus was real and that His divine majesty could make such imprints possible.
However, if we were to examine this from a purely scientific perspective, Moraes’s research suggests that the Shroud of Turin’s origins might be more artistic than divine.
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