About Shroud

It's a picture of Jesus, made out of Jesus

While I was in Rome in January, my friend Laura introduced me to a curator named Lilou, who introduced me to a medievalist named Nicolas, who is currently a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome. Villa Medici is a sixteenth-century villa that has been host to French artists ever since Louis XIV sent a generation of painters and sculptors to Rome so they could churn out copies of classical artworks to fill up Versailles. (That’s not necessary anymore. Versailles is now full.) The Villa continues to house the French Academy, which means it supports Francophone-ish culture through a lot of residencies and projects and shows. If you are in some way French and in some way could call yourself an artist, author, or researcher, maybe apply to live here for a year:

Through the mysteries of friends and institutions, if you end up in residence at Villa Medici you might be match-made with someone like me, a writer with a hobby-fixation on manuscripts and mystics who happens to be in Rome and is eager to learn about relics. Lilou invited me to write a piece of fiction related to Nicolas’s research, to be published along with an exhibition she’s curating, which meant that I got to meet with Nicholas and ask him about his extensive SHROUD expertise.¹ As always when you go medieval, you re-learn everything you thought you knew about authenticity, fakery, belief, transcendence, money, power, and suffering.

SHROUD PRIMER

Unlike your detritus-style relics like shards of saint’s bones or bits of the cross, a shroud is a trace of holy presence. It’s usually a piece of white linen that someone wiped on Jesus at some point during his ordeals, which bears the impression of his face or body in his own misery-fluids of sweat and blood and tears. But a shroud is hardly Mary on toast or a saint in the clouds; it’s not really an “image” at all. It’s both representation and evidence. It’s a picture of Jesus, made out of Jesus.

Paintings of the veil of Veronical by Domenico Fetti (1618/22) and Hans Memling (c. 1470).

Shrouds are special, but they fulfill the desire of relic-culture at large: contact with the divine through tangible objects. As a tour guide at the Catacombs of San Sebastiano in Rome told me, relics were the fundamental technology of Christianity. It’s hard to spread a belief system (much less a belief system revolving around the paradox of incarnation—the simultaneous presence and absence of God) unless you can circulate real (cool / morbid) stuff that’s loaded with otherwise ineffable divinity.

VAMPIRE VS. MAGNET

One thing I didn’t know before meeting Nicolas is that there are so many shrouds out there (thousands?!), because I had assumed that the number of times someone wiped or wrapped Jesus and then preserved the fabric for centuries would be relatively rare. Indeed, if you are into “facts,” it is not likely that this happened even once. But shrouds abounded between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, reaching peak popularity at the end of that span. That’s because both shrouds believed to be authentic—whose veracity was repeatedly “tested” and “proven”—and hoax shrouds could be worship-worthy relics.

For a long time, shrouds could clone themselves. If you made a copy and then touched the copy to the original, magic leeched into the copy and birthed a new pseudo-original. This chain of touching-magic could go on and on: you got it by touching something special that touched something special that touched something veryyy special. Thanks to contagious magic, a linen could have God all over it without having his (son’s/self’s) DNA in its fibers. And that magic could rub off on on people. That’s the whole point of getting your hands on a relic: it channeled power, usually of the healing variety. It goes back to that time Jesus stopped a woman’s twelve-year-long unending menstruation when she fingered the hem of his outfit. Nicolas writes:

In Christianity, the bodies of holy persons, dead or alive, are charged with a miraculous energy or virtus, transmitted to things surrounding them. This principle is found in the Gospels, with the episode of Jesus healing the bleeding woman whose hemorrhage ceases when she touches his cloak… Like a magnet, a thaumaturgical energy is drawn from the body of Christ that is transmitted through the textile interface, since Christ says, “Someone touched me; I know that power… has gone out from me” (Luke 8:46). The Acts of the Apostles report that “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul” (Acts 19:11) and “handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them” (Acts 19:12). A chain of virtue is thereby organized, from God who is the source, through Christ, Saint Paul, and the objects they touch.²

Bleeding woman gets healed, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome, 4th c. ACE.

It is a basic facet of “thaumaturgy,” or practical magic, to be transferrable between bodies and objects. Relics breed relics: “sacred bodies multiply”—that is, until the seventeenth century. As rationalism ate animism, magic started to be squeezed into smaller containers and become a limited quantity. New copies of shrouds could no longer be loaded with all the life-force of the original. You could still get some magic into a shroud copy by wiping it on Shroud Zero, but it would not become a Holy Shroud in its own right. In his essay on “contagious virtue” quoted above (one of my favorite pieces of his writing), Nicolas calls this the historical shift from “vampire” contagion—where the copy sucks out enough life force to mutate into its own powerful being—to “magnetic” contagion, where some magic rubs off, but only some.

PASSIONATE DATA

One reason that shrouds got popular in the fourteenth century is that medievals got eager for detailed info about Jesus—not just evidence that he lived or suffered (obvious) but precise (and prurient) details. Shrouds were part of this indexical obsession as to the measure of Christ’s suffering: hard data about the Passion.

Scripture doesn’t say much about Jesus’s visage. But if Christ’s horribly wounded body and protracted pain forms the basis for your devotional practices, it makes sense that maybe you’d want to know what his wounds looked like? And exactly how big those wounds were, so you could imagine them really vividly? And precisely how many droplets of blood he shed, so you could count them while you prayed? Look at the thorn pricks on his forehead! The length of his arms! (Unfortunately forearm length is one tell on several shrouds. I figure it’s hard to get the hands to cover the crotch just right without making one arm longer.)

Shroud copy known as the Xabregas shroud, Lisbon, early 16th c.

Indexical representation is not the same as the artistic tendency toward likeness that emerged during the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, a new definition of realism gained traction: accuracy was contingent on how much an artwork looked like the subject. Before, a person in a portrait could be identified through their accoutrements, status symbols, landscape, crests, etc.—similar to the way saints could be identified by their symbols (Saint Lucia holds her eyes; Saint Agatha holds her breasts). We know it’s them, but not because we know what their faces really looked like. And we know it’s Jesus because of the size of the gash. Shrouds are a transitional object between these shifting definitions of what makes an image realistic, what constitutes verisimilitude.

Crucial point: the Church was constantly trying to find ways to regulate the reproduction of relics. Too few and people lose touch; too many and you dilute the concentration of wealth. It’s not like fondling or even glancing at relics was usually free. They’re a solid, centuries-long tourist attraction.

2X IMPORTANT SHROUDS

If you know shrouds, you know Veronica’s: the veil that Saint Veronica took off her own head to wipe the grime from Jesus’s face while he walked the road towards crucifixion. I learned about that one in an art history class because you could (if you really wanted to) call this the first mechanically reproduced image in Western iconography: it’s not a representation of Jesus’s face, it’s an impression made through contact with the original, producing a negative image that could then theoretically produce infinite positives.³

The other mega shroud is the Shroud of Turin: a skein of linen that showed up in 1354, which was ostensibly wrapped around pre-resurrection Jesus in the tomb that bears a stained impression of his corpse, front and back. The coffin shroud, Nicolas told me, is particularly potent, because it’s an imprint of God while he was dead… think about that for a minute.

The Shroud of Turin has survived not one but TWO fires: in 1532 and 1997. You can imagine the excitement the first time when the chapel around the relic burned down but the relic survived. Turin’s shroud has a lot of stains and marks on it from such near-death catastrophes, so the corpus imprint is rather ghostly, but in 1898 an Italian attorney named Secondo Pia photographed it, producing eerily vivid images including an iconic negative that reveals a legible positive face—suggesting that the marks on the shroud really were the casted impression that they claimed to be. Evidence that it’s a death mask, not smears of paint: more solid fodder for media historians (speaking of which, someone should write a media analysis of the Shroud of Turin’s god-given website: shroud.com).

The Manopello guy; Secondo Pia’s 1898 negative of the Turin Shroud.

Veronica’s Shroud lives in the Vatican and on special occasions they trot it out for people to see from afar, which is like how they would have exhibited it when shrouds had their heyday. (Okay, there’s a Veronica dupe, the Veil of Manoppello, which the village of Manoppello insists is the real dupe.) A lot of Nicolas’s research is about this material culture—for instance, how churches paraded their own special shrouds as entertaining elements of annual town festivals, or applied them for various practical uses, such as prophylactics against plagues. The Black Death is on the way? Pull out the local shroud:

Antonio Tempesta’s depiction of the annual Turin Shroud display, turn of the 17th c.

You can still make a pilgrimage to the shroud in Turin’s cathedral, where it’s encased in a climate-controlled coffin, alongside some delightful media art that appropriately puts aside the question of whether the shroud is Real by posing this as a conflict/choice between brains and vibes (“it challenges our intelligence”). Today, the Vatican wisely “neither rejects nor endorses” the veracity of the Shroud of Turin.

I also visited the Shroud of Turin Museum, a separate institution that is one of the best science-fair / outsider-art basements I’ve been to, which includes replicas of weapons used to flagellate Jesus, incomprehensible proof of his blood in the cloth fibers, and Secondo Pia’s OG camera.

Shroud museum, incl. recreation of flagellation instrument plus close-up on the cloth: "Over 120 lesions are visible."

Starting in the 1980s a lot of important relics were carbon-dated, in a frenzy of trying to separate the history of Christianity from the truth of Christian devotion. (This has not deterred Shroud Truthers from Dan-Brown-level postulating.) Most Jesus-stained sheets and towels can be dated to sometime between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, as would be expected. That’s when people wanted them, so that’s when they showed up. And isn’t that the way magic works? Does belief not create evidence to support its aims? To quote myself: “Belief is a tautology. It justifies and reinforces itself.” Especially when institutions are consolidating wealth and power by profiting off your need to believe—because you’re suffering.

Don’t get me wrong: medieval European culture wasn’t homogeneous, Catholicism didn’t successfully decimate other traditions of material culture, and people came up with plenty of ways to subvert (and mock) the extractive, exploitative practices of franchised religion—plus they had private devotional practices and superstitions. But the Black Death did kill half of the humans living on the continent in the fourteenth-century. A linen to tie earthly suffering to holy experience and possibly help ward off the next pandemic? Please, let me have a feel of that hem. It can’t hurt.

IN HIS SHOES

When I asked Nicolas about other situations where you can see the size and shape of Jesus, he mentioned that there are not one but TWO places in Rome where you can see Jesus’s REAL footprints preserved in stone. Of course I asked what size Jesus’s feet were, and of course Nicolas knew the answer off the top of his head: 42.

Christ, size 42, Basilica San Sebastiano, Rome.

THREE RELICS SACRED TO ME

• My grandmother’s leather gloves that hold the shape (index) of her hands.

• The first tooth my friend’s child lost. A tooth under the pillow really is different than a tooth in the mouth: uncanny, undead, precious. And worth 5 Swiss francs, if the exchange rate is good.

• Ötzi the Ice Man, perfectly preserved for 5,000 years. I visited him in Bolzano.

CONTEMPORARY ART MOMENT

I am enamored by these Antonio Obá paintings. Look at that veil!

Antonio Obá, Avô – uma alegoria [Grandfather – An Allegory], 2023.

THIS WEEK I AM

Reading a pdf of Emily LaBarge’s forthcoming book Dog Days. I won’t tell you its secrets but I will say I left her a dozen rambling voice messages praising its tense, dense, intense, raveling, unraveling, totally unique way of storytelling a Big Trauma without lying. It’s so hard to not lie.

Taking my earthly body to not one but TWO McNally events: Feb 17, Mohammed El-Kurd & Fred Moten; Feb 18, Madeleine Watts & Leslie Jamison. In general, down with blurbs, but UP with Madeleine’s book, which I blurbed like so: “This is an astounding, heartbreaking, and important book. You’ll be different after reading it.”

1. Nicolas’s big shroud book, Les Suaires du Christ en Occident, is in French; I read translated excerpts plus heard it from the genius’s mouth. For ye Francophones curious about Turin’s relic, try his “L’interprétation d’une sainte trace.”

2. His essay “Relics: Contagious Virtue of Sacred Bodies” is in this excellent contagion compilation.

3. There are tons of HOLY FACE RELICS, aka drawings of Veronica’s shroud, which you can just go ahead and print out anytime on your Canon inkjet “to aid you in practicing the Holy Face Devotion.” Due to the enduring holiness of the image, the print cartridges will eject little tiny bits of magic onto the page.