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Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin

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Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin Secondo Pia. Photograph of the Holy Shroud (negative), 1898. 6 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00168 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00168 by guest on 24 September 2021 A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin PETER GEIMER TRANSLATED BY GERRIT JACKSON 1. “There Is Nothing There to See”: The Shroud in the Cathedral of Turin After the crucifixion of Christ, the Gospels report, Joseph of Arimathea received permission to bury the body. “So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb” (Mark 15:46). Two days later, the stone had been rolled away, and the tomb was deserted. But the shroud, it was later sur - mised, remained in the rock cave. A piece of linen sheet, it supposedly bore images of the body and face of the dead Christ. In the shroud, its devotees believed, posterity possessed a graphical record of the Passion. In contradistinction to the thousands of images of Christ produced over the course of art history, what Christianity seemed to have in this object was a portrait whose author was Christ himself: a last trace of the Savior before his mysterious ascension to the heavens. 1 The extant documents on the history of the shroud reach back to the four - teenth century. In the mid-fifteenth century, the shroud passed into the hands of the House of Savoy, which subsequently transferred it among its various resi - dences and exhibited it to the public on several occasions: in 1502, it was dis - played on the high altar in the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, and a year later it was shown in the palace of Philibert the Handsome in Bourg-en-Bresse, Flanders, where, as the courtier Antoine de Lalaing reports, it was dipped in boiling oil, thrust into the fire, and rubbed down several times to test its authenticity—“the impressions and images proved impossible to efface or remove.” 2 On the night of December 3, 1532, the shroud was rescued from the burning chapel of the abbey church at Chambéry; it survived the fire almost unharmed. In the eyes of the faithful, the Grey Room 59, Spring 2015, pp. 6–43. © 2015 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00168 by guest on 24 September 2021 traces of the damage it sustained were merely further proof of its authenticity. Further public exhibitions took place at Turin, Milan, Vercelli, Nice, Aosta. When the Black Death retreated from Milan in 1578, Cardinal Borromeo decided to make a pilgrimage to Chambéry in France, where the relic was kept at the time, and render his gratitude. To spare Borromeo the arduous crossing of the Alps, the shroud’s keepers took it and met him roughly halfway. On September 15, 1578, the relic arrived in Turin, where it was received amid cannon salutes fired by the local artillery. Ever since it has been in the Cathedral of Turin and presented to the public on various religious as well as secular occasions. The history of the shroud resembles the appearance of a comet. Its public pre - sentations were numerous, and yet each was no more than a brief interruption of a long history of absence. The shroud is meant to be waited for; it is there but not seen. One can spend a long time regarding the front of the altarpiece behind which it lies in the side chapel, rolled up like a scroll of parchment and hidden in a silver chest secured by several locks—but the shroud will not show itself. Its revelation is subject to an economy that is as simple as it is effective: for it to appear again and again, it must disappear each time and return to the place of its concealment. “The only things that appear are those which are first able to dissimulate themselves. Things already grasped in their aspect or peacefully resembling themselves never appear. They are apparent, of course, but only apparent: they will never be given to us as appearing .” 3 In the history of the shroud, each of these moments of appearance occasioned a special ceremony. When it was shown in 1898, the first exhibition after it had been locked up for twenty years, it literally had to be retrieved from behind several screens: the front of the marble altarpiece in the side chapel contained a glass door; behind that sat an iron cage; mounted inside, a second iron cage secured by three locks; within this was a doubly sealed wooden chest containing a silver receptacle; and inside the latter lay the shroud, tied up with four purple ribbons. On May 25, 1898, a procession approached the altar holding the hidden relic. The party consisted of the Duke of Aosta accompanied by his family, Archbishop Agostino Richelmy of Turin, and other archbishops, bishops, chap - lains, and secretaries. The locks were opened and the seals broken; the linen sheet was taken out, placed in a golden urn, and carried forth into the over - crowded church, where it was affixed to a frame and displayed above the altar. In a brief oration, a priest threatened anyone who dared to touch the shroud with immediate excommunication. Eyewitnesses to this exhibition later reported that discerning the silhouette of the body among the many traces of damage the shroud had sustained in the 8 Grey Room 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00168 by guest on 24 September 2021 course of its history was a matter of intuition rather than seeing. “The salient point I gather from an account in no. 257 of the Kreuzzeitung ,” the art historian Ernst von Dobschütz notes in his study Christusbilder , “is that the white cloth, stretched on a golden frame and displayed in the incense-heavy air of the chapel, was illuminated by means of reflectors, and yet, despite the glaring light, very little more than the bare outlines of a human body was recognizable in the two shadowy images.” 4 “Non si vede niente,” another eyewitness is later quoted. “There is nothing there to see”—but, the source continues, the witness then began to scan the fabric for the image in question and “bit by bit discovered it.” 5 The ambiguous display was on view for eight days. Those who came to see it beheld it in the certain knowledge that it would soon return to its crypt and not reappear for a long time. In that sense, the relic was never fully there , not even and espe - cially not during the brief periods of its visibility. The shroud appeared only on the condition that it would soon again be hidden from view, perhaps forever. 2. A Photographic Revelation: The Shroud in the Developer Bath In one respect, however, the 1898 exhibition was different from all earlier presen - tations: on this occasion, the shroud was photographed. And so, since 1898, it has never disappeared entirely; it has left the world its photographic double. Secondo Pia, a lawyer and amateur photographer who was also mayor of Asti, was commis - sioned to take the picture. Work on the picture could not interfere with the stream of visitors, so shooting took place at night. Pia had a platform set up in front of the altar and illuminated the relic with two arc lamps. On the night of May 28, 1898, he successfully produced two pictures on glass plates measuring fifty by sixty cen - timeters (twenty by twenty-four inches). 6 Later, in the seclusion of the darkroom, Pia discerned the contours of a face. “Ensconced in my chamber, entirely focused on my work, I felt a powerful shock when, during the development process, I saw the Holy Face gradually emerge on the plate.” 7 The front and rear views of a human body came into view against the dark ground of the glass negative. The image in the developer bath was subject to a peculiar inversion that would prove pivotal to the subsequent history of the shroud: the development of the negative had pro - duced not a negative but a positive image, in which what were dark markings on the shroud appeared as the bright lineaments of a body. In the upper part of the picture, a human face and hair can be seen; folded hands appear near the center. Pia concluded that the likeness on the shroud was already a negative: the picture in the developer bath was accordingly the negative of a negative—a positive image. “The miracle of photography now took possession of the shroud in its entirety . the shroud itself became a photograph. Its history begins with this moment.” 8 Geimer | A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00168 by guest on 24 September 2021 Not immediately obvious is precisely where in the unforeseeable effect the surprise and surplus value of this photographic revelation lies. That the dark markings on the shroud, which had long been seen and described, would be inverted into light markings was surely to be expected. So what exactly was it that was made visible for the first time? After all, in the history of the shroud, an entire series of illustrations before Pia’s photographic reproductions had ren - dered the cloth as the medium of the depiction of a human form.
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