JERUSALEM, JULY 23, 2006
(Zenit.org).

The Pontifical Institute Notre Dame of Jerusalem opened a
permanent exhibition dedicated to the Shroud of Turin.

The inauguration
and blessing on Saturday of the exhibition entitled "Who Is the Man of the Holy
Shroud?" was presided over by Archbishop Antonio Franco, apostolic nuncio to
Israel and apostolic delegate in Jerusalem and Palestine.

Highlights of
the exhibition include a digitalized copy of the Holy Shroud exactly as it is in
Turin, and a bronze sculpture by Italian sculptor Luigi Mattei, who has
reconstructed in three dimensions the body of the man of the Holy Shroud. The
sculpture shows for the first time the whole body imprinted on the linen.

The main objective of the exhibition, according to the institute, is to
help those who pass through Jerusalem to reflect on and to appreciate the
sufferings of Christ as stated in the Gospels and as they appear on the Holy
Shroud.

The exhibition is open Monday through Saturday, from 9:30 a.m.
to 12:30 p.m., and from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The argument that history’s proto-photo was a life- sized photo(!) on a fourteen-foot cloth(!) that was a composite(!): double corpse with daubed-on blood and, in separate processes, Leonardo’s own head front and back, is a priori far-fetched. The premise is more demanding of faith than is the authenticity of the Shroud. I am led to ask why Leonardo has left us his self-portrait in red chalk and not his photo, and why he would use another body when Vasari notes that his own physique was near-perfect, and everybody knows his exorbitant vanity.

Scavone adds:

This question leads the authors to another assertion: Leonardo was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which esteemed John the Baptist over Jesus. Therefore, the apparent disembodied head visible on the Shroud man was Leonardo’s cipher for the decapitated Baptist. Leonardo’s use of his own photo, they argue, was owing to his inordinate vanity, the same that prompted him to encode his own face in his famous portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco de Giocondo. This theory was confirmed by Lillian Schwartz of Bell Laboratories and Dr. Digby Quested of London, who discovered that it matched up perfectly with the major lines of Leonardo’s face in the above-mentioned self-portrait at age sixty. Picknett writes "Leonardo was capable of subtly building his own image into that of his masterpieces; if he had done so with the Mona Lisa, why not with the Shroud?"