The Concept of Negativity Through the Ages vs The Negative
Image on the Shroud
By Isabel Piczek
Copyright 1997
For those who do not know me: I am an artist-physicist, a
creator of huge murals, stained glass and other large
artworks.
The Shroud of Turin is a negative image. Since 1988 global
Shroud research fixed its total attention on the C14 dating
results. The one Branch of physics, which was painfully
neglected through the ages, is the problematic physics of
Time and its function. We do not know how long the first 3
minutes lasted after the Big Bang compared to our 3 minutes
now.
No one understands how the universe can be younger --
according to newest finds -- than some of the oldest stars
we see.
The quantum theory suggested discreet intervals of time but
it is not followed up by its mathematics of continuous space
and time. Unsolved Time physics makes any dating, including
the C14 results essentially suspect, period.
Rather, let our attention turn once again on the negative
quality of the Shroud image, never explained, where the
answer to the image making mechanism lies.
It is generally believed that the negative image was not
known before modern times. This is not true. But what
mankind thought of the negative was very different from ours
and vastly different from age to age. The negative concept
influenced what people thought created the image on the
Shroud and the famous heresies of the wrong image making
mechanisms.
THE SWEAT CREATED IMAGE DIVINELY CAUSED
True, very few negative forms exist in nature; depressions
of footprints or temporary prints of objects due to water,
sweat, blood. That is why it was thought in early times,
that the Shroud image is a depression of the God-man's body
made by sweat, miraculously made permanent. To our present
knowledge, no copies of the Shroud survived from before
1516.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE NEGATIVE MOLD AND CAST
The Greco-Roman statues were still familiar to the artists
of the 6th - 7th centuries, some cast into bronze,
terracotta, silver.
Artists had to learn about another idea of the negative, -
the mold and the cast. The mold taught him how to translate
the negative form through the cast into the positive form of
his own creation. Does this mean he could also create the
opposite, an absolutely free hand, negative portraitlike
design? Not at all. The photo negative did not exist yet for
hundreds of years.
We cannot project our own present concept of negativity into
another age. But because the familiarity with the cast he
could translate with fair success the negative form into a
positive one, as shown by the breathtakingly accurate
Pantocrator image at St. Catherine Monastery, Sinai.
That this truly is a positive image made after the Shroud,
can be proven, if we compare it with another image in the
catacomb of St. Marcellinus and Peter. This much older
painting from mid fourth century was based on earlier
tradition of eyewitness. It remained in the secret isolation
of the catacomb with no possible connection to the
Pantocrator of Sinai. Yet, they are almost identical, except
a few peculiarities of the Pantocrator image not seen on the
catacomb painting: the swelling of the cheek and the nose,
the peculiarly uplifted eyebrow and the different focus of
the two eyes. Both images resemble the Shroud, but only the
Pantocrator matches the signs of torture.
THE INFLUENCE OF BLOCKPRINTING:
THE CONTACT IMAGE PRINTED BY
SWEAT AND BLOOD
From the 15th century would emerge a completely new idea in
the course of civilization, the mass distribution of images
and ideas through the agency of the negative, blockprinting.
The process of obtaining a series of copies by means of a
stamp, or matrix actually is very ancient and can be traced
back to neolithic people of Europe, Egypt, India and China.
But it was used merely for authentication. In the 15th
century the volume production of paper was introduced, made
from linen instead of cotton. Suddenly, the printing of
didactic books for mass use is launched, printed page by
page from single wood blocks. Wood blocks and later metal
plates were also used to print illustrations of great art,
and also to print cloth by hand.
All these blocks would print in reverse under pressure. The
ultimate limitation of this is that the part of the block
printed is left intact, while the rest is cut away.
Therefore, the portions of the block, which do the printing,
are all the same height, the only way to keep the print
undistorted. This very simply explains why the Shroud image,
if a body in relief was wrapped in the Shroud, could not be
a contact image. The undistorted anatomy of the image
testifies to this.
THE IMAGE CONCEIVED AS A PRINT
Suddenly the number of Shroud copies are multiplied in the
16th and 17th centuries. They all clearly show the influence
of printing. One cannot say these artists did not know the
Shroud was a negative image, But they were familiar with a
different type of negativity. Printmaking in volume was a
powerful revolution. They could not see beyond it, as we
today cannot see beyond the photographic negative. We cannot
look for our more developed concepts of negativity in other
ages long gone. These copies proved what we said before.
Whenever mankind discovers a new form of negativity, a new
and erroneous image-making mechanism will emerge out of it.
Blockprinting had to depend on very graphic styles in art.
After wood engraving and engraving was developed for the
more precise reproductions of paintings, negativity assumes
a more sophisticated and subtle form. The sweat and
aloes-printed contact image slowly is replaced by the idea
that the Shroud was a painting. In Belgium the Shroud was on
exhibition in 1449 and it already was called "an astonishing
art".
However, there is no continuous paint medium film on the
Shroud, while there is a continuous, uninterrupted image.
This goes against every law of nature and the basic
technology of art. There also is foreshortening on the body
of the Man of the Shroud, not known before the high
renaissance. Also, a painting cannot reflect something more
than what the artist knew and wanted to convey.
The closer we go to a painting the less we can learn about
it. The Shroud, on the other hand, can be endlessly studied
and new, specific and startling information will emerge, not
known by anyone before.
PHOTONEGATIVITY: THE SHROUD, A PHOTOGRAPH?
In this age we can only think in terms of photonegativity.
The principle of photography, one might say, follows the
same rules of geometrical optics as vision itself, dependent
on light propagating itself in straight lines, vanishing
point, perspective and foreshortening. But the mechanics of
photography is different. It is the action of light on
chemically prepared material. The particles cluster where
light was strongest on the film, producing a continuous tone
image of the light and shadow in reverse.
Blockprinting, wood engraving, and engraving as well as
photography, through exactly repeatable pictorial
statements, serve mass information. But the accuracy of
woodblock printing, and engraving depended on draftsmanship
and style and therefore they distributed rather intellectual
information than a precise record of what truly existed.
There always remained a gap in credibility which limited a
scientific investigation based on it. In that sense
photography was a different kind of revolution. It could
record the instant and become a more reliable testimony of
how things were once. But it sums up only an isolated
instant without placing it in context with anything else,
and it makes its record of an instant within the framework
of its own technology. As a result, importantly, anything
that the technology is not yet able to see has to go
unrecorded and even unnoticed. This sets the limit on
photonegativity and what it can and will communicate.
Although, today, we cannot see negativity without conceiving
it in terms of photonegativity, we should not believe that
this is the end of the line, as the mold and blockprinting
were not the end of the line either. There are types of
negativity which we cannot even fathom today, but which will
overwhelm the minds of tomorrow. Did photonegativity solve
the problem of why the Shroud is a negative image? No. There
are very basic differences between the Shroud image and a
photo negative.
The one which in particular devastates the photo idea is
that every photograph is a light-created image with a
definite light focus (directionality of light). the Shroud
is not a lightcreated image and it has no light focus.
One of the other great differences is that the Shroud is
just plain, raw linen. There is absolutely no evidence on it
of a material chemically sensitized to light. Its system of
negativity is alien to the system of a photo negative. What
made the positive portrait of the Shroud man possible,
marginally resembling a photo process?
DENSITY
The densities of the colored fibres due to an unexplained
dehydration process cause a somewhat comparable mechanism on
the Shroud which, when photographed, translates into a
positive effect. In each suggestion about an image making
mechanism through the ages a different understanding of the
negative is hidden. Are we closer to the truth today?
A hundred years ago in Paris the ghostly image of a key was
captured on a photoplate in the drawer of a scientist, the
plate was accidentally hidden under a stone. It was believed
that sunlight was captured within the stone which slowly
ejected itself and caused the ghostly image of the key on
the photoplate. The explanation falls back on traditional
beliefs of the physics of the times, but falls short of
explaining every facet of the phenomenon experienced. Marie
and Pierre Curie did not succumb to this traditional
explanation. Due to their more original thinking a new
quality of nature was found, radioactivity. (See the article
"Is The Shroud of Turin a Painting?" for more on this,
including an illustration of the "key image").
We too have a ghostly negative image at hand, first hidden
in a tomb and then a silverchest. We too try to explain it
through what physics and chemistry knows today. However,
neither of them explained entirely our ghostly image.
I think the greatest proof of authenticity is that so many
of us, after centuries of study, still cannot find the final
answer.
Someone is challenging us, challenging us through the
evolving mysteries of this piece of cloth, the precise
blueprint of the yet inaccessible future, always in the dim
light of our vision, but never in our grasp.