By Richard Allen Greene
(CNN) -- An Italian scientist says he has reproduced one of the world's most famous Catholic relics, the Shroud of Turin. His reproduction support his belief it is a medieval fake, not the cloth Jesus was buried in.
Luigi Garlaschelli says his reproduction of the shroud disprove claims of its strongest supporters.
Garlaschelli created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students. He painted it with pigment, baked it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, and then washed it.
His result looks like the cloth that many Christians through the centuries have believed is the actual burial shroud of Jesus, he told CNN.
"What you have now is a very fuzzy, dusty and weak image," he said. "Then for the sake of completeness I have added the bloodstains, the burns, the scorching because there was a fire in 1532."
"Basically the Shroud of Turin has some strange properties and characteristics that they say cannot be reproduced by human hands," he told CNN by phone from Italy, where he is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia.
"For example, the image is superficial and has no pigment, it looks so lifelike and so on, and therefore they say it cannot have been done by an artist."
His research shows the pigment may simply have worn off the cloth over the centuries since it was first "discovered" in 1355 many centuries after Christ was crucified.
After the Impurities in the pigment etched an image into the fibers of the cloth, it left behind the ghostly picture that remains.
"The procedure is very simple. The artist took this sheet and put it over one of his assistants," he said.
"His good idea was to wrap the sheet over the person underneath because he didn't want to obtain an image that was too obviously a painting or a drawing, so with this procedure you get a strange image," said Garlaschelli.
"Time did the rest," he said.
See the rest of the article at
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/07/italy.turin.shroud/index.html
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