Shroud of Turin secretly restored
Experts performed a top-secret restoration of the Shroud of Turin, removing centuries-old patches and replacing a backing sewn centuries ago on to what some say was the burial cloth of Jesus, church officials announced today.
The restoration was carried out with explicit Vatican permission, and aimed only to protect and document the artifact, Shroud of Turin custodians said.
The project consisted of three main elements - the removal of patches and a backing sewn on to the shroud in the 16th century, a digital scan of both sides and photo documentation.
The restoration took place between June 20 and July 23 by Shroud expert Mechthild Flury Lemberg and restorer Irene Tomedi.
Vague reports of the project leaked to the media in August, enraging other Shroud experts, who argued that the work should have involved less secrecy and more international collaboration.
Shroud custodians said today that silence had been necessary because they feared after September 11 that the cloth could become a target for attack while it was being restored.
The shroud, which is kept in the Turin cathedral, is a strip of linen about 14ft long and 3.5ft wide that is marked by an image of Jesus.
Believers say the image was left by his body after he was taken off the cross.
A carbon-dating test ended in 1988 with a scientific team declaring that the shroud apparently came from medieval times.
Disputes have flourished over that study and others, including one by researchers at the Hebrew University that concluded that pollen and plant images on the shroud showed it originated around Jerusalem some time before the eighth century.
The shroud is kept under tight security, with only a handful of people allowed access, among them Flury Lemberg, who was part of a commission established to study its conservation in 2000.
The shroud has for years included patches and a backing sewn on to the cloth after a fire damaged it in 1532.
But experts argued that dirt had collected under the patches, and that the cloth was wrinkled.
”The small spaces between the cloth of the patches and the Shroud cloth had allowed for the accumulation of centuries of dust and detritus, and a notable quantity of microscopic carbonised cloth fragments,” the Catholic Church’s custodians of the Shroud said in a statement.
Flury Lemberg substituted the old backing with a fresh one “in a way that made it possible at every point to verify the non-invasiveness of the intervention”.
The restoration and the removal of the patches “have restored an image of the Shroud that, at first impact, is a little different than that which everybody remembers. For this reason, a series of photographs were carried out.”
Dirty threads and other materials removed in the project were stored in containers and will be held by the Vatican, which may in the future decide to allow them to be used for academic study.
The Shroud has been shown to the public for limited periods, and during 2000 more than one million visitors viewed it during a special showing for Holy Year celebrations.
No date had been set for a new public display, Turin Cardinal Severino Poletto said, according to the AGI news agency. However, photos of the restored Shroud and video footage of the work are available on www.sindone.org, the official Shroud web site.
