In November of 2004 I had an accident and fractured a vertebra. At that particular moment I wanted to start sculpting a PIETA but my recovery took 5 months and I was unable to work, so I decided to look for the most original face of Jesus Christ and his mother Mary in the Internet, and then using these images for the sculpture. When you look for these faces you end up automatically with what are called the “acheiropoeita”, or “images not made by human hands”. They are, the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the Tilma of the Indian Juan Diego in Mexico City and the image of the Man on the Shroud of Turin. I then started to study many books written about the Shroud of Turin during my 5 months of rehabilitation. I was rather familiar with the 3D concept because I founded, and for many years worked in an ULTRASOUND CENTER in Curacao, the Netherlands Antilles, and had the opportunity to follow from the beginning of the eighties of last century the development of this particular 3D technique. I also studied the theory of the HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE (Dr. Susskind, Gerard van “t Hooft and Dr. Wheeler), and was very familiar with the concept of Holography. With this expertise in mind, there were two observations that caught my attention.
The first observation was: with the knowledge that there was a cloth-to-body distance information present, it should be possible to CREATE HOLOGRAMS based on this information in the image, after conversion from 2D to 3D.

The second observations that caught my attention were:
1) The image on the Shroud appears more distinct at a distance and fades when viewed at certain angles, particularly as one comes closer to the Shroud. The image is faint, without well-defined boundaries so the eye has no point of reference and it appears simply as variation of the background density. In addition, you’re viewing only a small portion of the entire image up close. In a way, it is out of context and it is only as you back away that it is seen as part of the bigger picture that gives it meaning. This is the classical explanation of this observation. HOWEVER, it is also a HOLOGRAPHIC OBSERVATION. If you stand in front of a large hologram, where thanks to the angle of the lighting you are able to see the image, and you back up or come close or go to the side for that matter, the image becomes very vague or disappears completely.
2) After the fire in the Basilica of San Juan Batista in 1997, the Shroud that had been saved by the Fire Brigade of Turin, was brought to the residence of the Custodian to investigate it for damage that might have been caused by the fire. ALDO GUERRESCHI, a professional photographer, who was very familiar with the Shroud image because he had worked for many years with Giuseppe Enrie in Turin, was asked to photo-document the examination of the Shroud, to determine the state of the sheet and to photograph possible damage to it. He published in 2000 after the International Convention of Sindonological Studies (San Felice Circeo) an article: “The Turin Shroud: from the photo to the three-dimensional”. I quote from this article:
3) “ I therefore had the good fortune to see the Shroud in close up for a whole day. When this sheet was enrolled on a long table (with light coming only from one side of the room where there were windows high up), I realized that everything that I had learned up to that point was worth nothing: the image that I thought I knew was not that one. While photography has the advantage of fixing an image in time and of concentrating it so that whichever angle you look at it from, it will remain the same, with the Shroud that is not the case. Moving around that table (lighting under an angle from one side only !), from a certain angle I saw this image so faded as if to practically disappear, while from others it seemed as if the figure WAS ALMOST OUTSIDE THE SHEET: it was, I repeat, an incredible emotion. At that moment I knew that this image was unique. I approached the face placing my camera at a distance of about 20-30 cm, aimed the camera at the face and saw…………………nothing in my viewfinder”. “And yet “, I said, “ I know it by heart”. I had to beg my friend to point to the position of the eye, because from a distance of 30 cm, I could not see it. I could only see it as I moved away from it”. (Aldo Guerreschi confirmed to me personally these observations during a meeting in Turin in 2008). In Holography the angle of the light is very important to see the hologram, and he wrote me a mail in 2008:

“ Concerning the question that you asked me on the light that illuminated the Shroud that was horizontally laid out on a table. I remember only a light from the windows, at a distance of 3 to 4 meters, higher op the wall, not very strong and only from one side, parallel to the Shroud”. These observations are again having a very strong HOLOGRAPHIC QUALITY.

Checking Shroud for damages after 1997 fire

All these observations pointed to the fact that there is a great probability, that apart from the 3D-distance information in the grey-scale of the image there could also be holographic information hidden in the Shroud. Now, holography is based on a fixed interference pattern of two light waves, the object beam and the reference beam (laser light), and the medium to fixate that pattern is a special holographic film. How there can exist an interference pattern in a linen cloth is basically unexplainable and we are working on finding a solution for these problems. Another factor would be, if there is an interference pattern present, how to activate that. But it makes for nice science to solve all these obstacles!

Just recently I found an article in which theoretical physicist SUE BENSON advanced the idea, that the Shroud image may be more than a negative and a 3D encoding. It may actually be a quantum hologram. Quantum holography, still very theoretical, is getting considerable attention in research laboratories as prestigious as IBM, in search of new ways for storing and retrieving large amounts of information. Benson, in an article in the December/January 2001 issue of Journal of Theoretics, describes macro-level quantum holography that may be applicable to the formation of the Shroud image. Quantum holographs should produce three-dimensional information as well as negativity and may very well offer some quantum event explanation of how the image was formed.

There are not many people, including scientists, that know exactly how holography works and what the consequences would be for the Shroud studies, so in the beginning of 2005 I decided to find a laboratory that could create these holograms of the face and the body on the Shroud and having these holograms it would be much easier to explain the holographic ideas for Shroud studies behind it. I was born in the Netherlands and contacted the Dutch Holographic Laboratory in Eindhoven and had a meeting with Walter Spierings, the owner. After lots of brainstorming we decided to form a team of experts for the six different steps that it would take to produce the holograms and that was achieved in 2005 and resulted in the production of the first hologram of the face in September of 2005.

THE DIFFERENT STEPS INVOLVED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THE HOLOGRAMS:

1) PHOTOGRAPHS Photographs being used were 1st and 2nd generation copies of the Enrie photographs of 1931.

2) DIGITAZATION The photographs were digitized with 7000×10.000 pixels.
3) BARRIE SCHWORTZ EXPERTISE Solution for the image-less area on the right side of the face.
4) 2D to 3D CONVERSION Done by Bernardo Galmarini in Argentina and later perfected by the Dutch Holographic Laboratory.
5) CREATION OF THE MASTER HOLOGRAM Dutch Holographic Laboratory.
6) COPIES OF MASTERS Also other 3D products, lenticulars, anaglyph photographs.

The different steps that are mentioned here you can find in the next chapters, under the different titles mentioned here. So different chapters for Photographs, Digitazation, Conversion etc. etc.

PETRUS SOONS RESPONDS TO GARLASCHELLI: This excellent response was written October 6, 2009 by PETRUS SOONS, noted Shroud researcher who produced the first three-dimensional holographic images of the Shroud. Petrus presented his dramatic results at the Ohio Shroud Conference in August 2008.

In the last few days, a story appeared in the mass media that an Italian Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pavia (Italy), reproduced the image on the Shroud of Turin using materials and methods that were available in the 14th century, concluding that the experiment proves the relic was man-made. Basically, he used a linen cloth in scale 1:1, that was baked at 215 degrees C for three hours and then put it in a washing machine with water only. Then they put a person dirtied with RED OCHRE (IRON OXIDE) on the linen and corrected by hand the colored image. A chalk bas relief was used for the face printing, liquid tempera simulated the blood and sulfuric acid at 1.2% in water added with Aluminium and Cobalt modified the linen surface. An artificial aging was the final treatment before the pigment was washed. The final goal was to show that it was possible to create a fake in the 14th century.

Now there is nothing new to this. In 1979, Walter C. McCrone (1916-2002), an internationally recognized microscopist and the director of the famous McCrone Associates Research Laboratory in Chicago, reported that the Shroud image was due to the application of RED OCHRE, also known as Venetian red (an earth color) a red artist’s pigment, which is a red IRON OXIDE, so probably Prof. Garlaschelli took over this idea from Walter C. McCrone.
This theory was already disproved by the scientific STURP team (and others in the years after that) that concluded the investigations in 1978 on the Shroud of Turin.
Their conclusions were:
1) ADLER reported that the “straw-yellow color” of the body image fibers does not match the color of any of the known forms of ferric iron oxides.
2) Moreover, ADLER reports that there is no correspondence of the body-only images to the concentration of iron oxide since the spectral characteristics of the body-only image are different from those of iron oxide.
3) The color of the fibers, due to iron oxide, is also precluded by the fact that oxidation or reduction converts the yellow fibers of the body-only image to a white color.

4) Only rare particles of iron oxide are noted on the body-only image fibers.
5) Large amounts of iron bound to the cellulose of the Shroud (not iron oxide) and Calcium were both present throughout the Shroud. This is believed due to the ability of linen to bind iron and water by ion association during the retting process (manufacturing process by which linen is immersed in water during fermentation). An ESTIMATED 90% of the iron and calcium exist in this form bound to the cellulose of the linen, AND ONLY A SMALL AMOUNT IS PRESENT AS IRON OXIDE.
6) X-ray studies of the body-only image do not contain enough iron oxide to show up on the X-radiographs.

All of the iron of the Shroud, whether from iron oxide particles or from blood, proved to be 99% percent chemically pure, with no discernable MANGANESE, NICKEL or COBALT. The earth pigment, RED OCHRE (Venetian red), from either medieval or older sources that were being used, was contaminated with manganese, nickel or cobalt GREATER THAN 1 PERCENT!!!

The STURP team employed microprobe Raman spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy, optical and infrared spectroscopy, micro FTIR spectroscopy, pyrolysis mass spectroscopy, X-ray and a variety of microchemical tests on the fibrils, and came to the conclusion that there was NO ochre or other pigments, dyes or stains on the fibrils of the Shroud.

Prof Garlaschelli told Republica he didn’t think his research would convince those who have faith in the Shroud’s authenticity. “They won’t give up” he said. “those who believe in it will continue to believe”.

Well, the reason why serious scientists do not believe Prof. Garlaschelli’s work has been explained.

Prof. Garlaschelli explains the absence of any traces of iron oxide on the original Shroud by stating that the pigment on the original Shroud faded away naturally over the centuries. This is not a statement that you would expect from a serious scientist. The spectroscopic investigations being done in 1978 would even show the slightest traces of iron oxide present on the Shroud and it is a little bit “unscientific” to state that they disappeared “naturally”.

He also mentions the fact that his image shows 3D qualities. Well that is a field that I am very familiar with, having produced with a team of experts the first holograms of the Shroud image. The uniqueness of the Shroud image is, that hidden in the grayscale (image density) is distance information, meaning that the image on the Shroud varies inversely with the cloth-to-body distance. When converting the grayscale from 2D to 3D, the result is an anatomically correct image of a human being, contrary to the result that you will obtain using any other image (photograph, painting etc.), including the one of prof. Garlaschelli, that always will show distortions, like the nose pressed into the face and protruding cheeks etc. etc., which means that this unique distance info is not present.

Another little detail is the fact that on the original Shroud there is no image under the bloodstains, proving the fact that there were two image formation processes. Direct contact for the blood proper and another image formation process for the image itself. Prof. Garlaschelli added the “blood” (liquid tempera) later on top of the image that he had created. Under Ultra-Violet fluorescence photography (not known of course in the 14th century), the blood on the Shroud shows a serum separation, visible as a lighter ring around a darker center, which is typical of post-mortem wound exudate. This is not visible with the naked eye. The proposed artist from the 14th century could of course not have known this fact, so he could not create it either.

The Shroud of Turin is a piece of linen 442.5 cm (441.5 cm) long and 113 cm (113.7 cm) wide. These are the measurements of this linen after the restoration of 2002 and done by Bruno Barberis and Gian Maria Zaccone. The fabric is hand-woven and handspun in a herringbone pattern and bears different images. The most notable are the front and back images of a crucified man, head to head, with the feet of both images facing to the outside of the cloth. Further, the image has a number of burn holes, as well of water-stains. The burn holes are on the side of the body image and result from a fire in 1532 in Chambery in the south of France. Other burn marks include the so-called poker holes for which no dating is known.

Positive and negative image of the Shroud

Both a front and a back image are present because the crucified man was laid out on one end of the 4 meter linen sheet. The opposite end of the Shroud was then doubled over the top of the head, over the face and down to the front of the body.

Positive image of the Shroud

The body is naked, bearded and long-haired. The face has a mask-like appearance with the eyes representing an owl-eyed look. In the frontal view the forehead area shows blood in the form of a reverse “figure-3” pattern, with small spots of blood on the left and right of the forehead and in the hair, all representing bleeding from the crown of thorns. The back and top of the head also show bloodspots, as a result of the sharp thorns. The hair in the frontal image is forward, covering the ears. The head is bent forward, and slightly turned to the anatomical right side. The eyebrows and the area below the right eye and the bridge of the nose appear to be swollen. There is a line in the middle of the bridge of the nose that is consistent with a bone/cartilage separation. This does not have the aspect of a fracture. The moustache and beard are visible and colored due to the fluid from the lung edema that came out of the nose and mouth, after the body was lowered from the cross and put in a horizontal position.

Negative image of the face

The arms show directional blood flows consistent with the position they had during the crucifixion. The hands are crossed just below the umbilicus at the hip level with the left hand over the right one. Both thumbs are missing,, and a wrist wound is visible on the right side, obviously due to a nail wound. There is a raising of the chest consistent with rigor mortis. On the right side of the thorax there is a large area of blood, with on the top a wound in the shape of a Roman spear (called the hasta), in the region of the sixth intercostals place, representing the blood flow from the spear wound.
This continues to the middle-back side, and shows the blood flow that went to the back after the body was put in a horizontal position.

Negative image of the body

The back, buttocks, legs, chest and abdomen, show evidence of scourge marks, many of them depicted as dumb-bell shaped images, caused by the Roman Flagrum Taxulatum. The shape of the buttocks is round and not flat, and this is also an indication of rigor mortis. The right shoulder is lower than the left and might be a sign of a luxation of the shoulder. Images in the region of the left scapula and right shoulder area suggest abrasions, caused by the carrying of the vertical beam of the cross, the patibulum. There is also a slight bulging of the abdomen. The buttocks are a-symmetrical, with the right lower than the left. The legs are close together. There is a large abrasion and contusion on the left knee region. The calves show a natural roundness. The bare feet reveal the right sole and part of the left foot in the back image, covered with dirt, and also blood coming from the nail wound. The left foot is crossed over the right foot. The left leg id bended more than the right leg.