But could Leonardo da Vinci also have perpetrated history's greatest art forgery? That's the suggestion of one expert, who claims that Leonardo was responsible for faking the Turin Shroud.The relic has inspired generations of pilgrims who have flocked to see what they believe is the face of the crucified Jesus. But it has also provoked bitter controversy after scientists carbon-dated it to the Middle Ages.
Now an American artist has entered the fray, putting forward her own theory about its origin. Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York, claims that the image is a self-portrait of Leonardo, which was made using a crude photographic technique. Using computer scans she found that the face on the Turin Shroud and a self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci share the same dimensions
Miss Schwartz came to prominence in the 1980s when she made detailed measurements of the Mona Lisa and a Leonardo self-portrait. To her amazement, the two faces lined up perfectly, leading her to suggest that he used a self portrait as a model for the painting.
Earlier this year she used the same technique to compare another Leonardo self-portrait with the Turin Shroud. 'It matched. I'm excited about this,' she said. 'There is no doubt in my mind that the proportions that Leonardo wrote about were used in creating this Shroud's face.'
According to a Channel Five documentary to be shown tonight, Leonardo scorched his facial features on to the linen of the Shroud using a sculpture of his face and a photographic device called a 'camera obscura'. He would have hung the shroud's fabric over a frame in a blacked- out room and coated it with a substance to make it light-sensitive, just like photographic film. When the sun's rays passed through a lens in one of the walls, Leonardo's 3D model would have been projected on to the material, creating a permanent image. (Daily Mail)
