A Comparison between the Face of the Veil of Manoppello and the Face of the Shroud of Turin

Abstract

Recently we have studied the unusual optical properties of the Veil of Manoppello, a canvas representing the face of Jesus Christ, and restored digitally the face, by eliminating the distortions of the anatomic details due the yielding of the very fine structure of the fabric. The aim of the present paper is to compare the restored face of the Veil with that visible on the Turin Shroud. In particular, the paper focuses on assessing whether the two images can be superimposed, i.e., whether they are different images of the same face. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the Veil of Manoppello and the Turin Shroud show different images of the same face. We demonstrate that the face of the Turin Shroud, after a logarithmic transformation of the intensity and the correction of the background noise, shows cheeks’ profiles, not visible before the digital processing, which overlap very well with those of the restored face of the Veil of Manoppello. These correlations between the two images of the face of Jesus raise the question of their historical relationship.

Keywords

• Veil of Manoppello
• Turin Shroud
• Jesus Christ iconography