Saturday, April 20, 2019

The Da Vinci hoax





“The Da Vinci Shroud” is a fascinating documentary about the so-called Shroud of Turin, which for centuries was believed to be the death shroud of Jesus Christ himself. While the Shroud still has its devotees, scientific testing proves the textile can´t be older than the 13th or 14th centuries, making it one of many fake medieval relics. Unless it´s even more recent…

The documentary features Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, two writers on alternative history and conspiracy theory. While I haven´t read their book on the Shroud of Turin, I have looked at some of their other works and found them to be an intriguing blend of the bizarrely true and the merely bizarre – a bit as if David Icke would suddenly start to make sense. I readily admit that the idea that Leonardo da Vinci made the Turin Shroud strikes me as bizarrely plausible!

Picknett and Prince believe that Leonardo was a secret heretic, and therefore would have no problem producing a potentially blasphemous fake relic of Jesus after the crucifixion. The motive would have been economical: Leonardo´s patrons in the House of Savoy had acquired an earlier fake burial shroud of Jesus made in the 14th century by a French family with Templar connections. Leonardo´s mission was to improve on the relic, which had apparently been widely denounced as a hoax, making it look fool proof, thereby enhancing the power and prestige of Savoy. Da Vinci also had the means at his disposal to create the hoax of the millennium, including fresh corpses used for dissection and considerable anatomical knowledge.

But how was the image on the Shroud of Turin actually made? Here, the documentary draws on the speculations of Nicholas Allen, an art historian who believes that a form of photography was known already in medieval times. “The Da Vinci Shroud” shows his experiment, using only materials available during the period in question – and yes, it works. Leonardo could very well have known of the technique. Most sensationally, and perhaps ironically, some researchers now believe that the face of “Jesus” on the shroud is really the face of Leonardo da Vinci himself! There are also suspicions that the face of the Mona Lisa is really Leonardo, turning even that famous piece of art into a “hoax” of sorts.

So for almost 500 years people have venerated the face of Leonardo believing it to be the Son of God, while also considering Mona Lisa to be the most beautiful woman in the world, not knowing they (if they are male, that is) really have a homosexual crush on a young Leonardo… Sounds like something from “Life of Brian”, frankly. Of course, this raises a lot of disturbing questions. How much of history, or our knowledge in general, can we really trust? How can we be sure that the *original* story of Jesus hasn´t been tampered with, to take an obvious example?

And where the hell does this leave us, anyway?

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