Nothing much happened for almost 80 years, until disaster struck on the night of 4 December 1532, when a fire broke out in the chapel where it was kept behind the high altar in a silver casket housed in a niche sealed with a metal grille. It seems that Peter did not succeed in getting the exhibition closed down, as Clement replied that he was happy for the cloth to be shown as ‘an image or representation’ of the true shroud.Īfter around 60 years of being moved about, in 1453 Geoffrey’s granddaughter, Margaret, finally passed the shroud to the ducal house of Savoy, who took it to their capital at Chambéry in the Alps. Nothing more is known of this episcopal enquiry, but in 1389 one of Henry’s direct successors, Bishop Peter d’Arcis, wrote to Antipope Clement VII in Avignon to tell him of Bishop Henry’s enquiry, and to complain that the linen was being displayed again. Its owners were the local knight, Geoffrey de Charney, and his wife, Jeanne de Vergy.ĭespite the insistence of the conspiracy brigade, there is no known connection between this Geoffrey de Charney (or his son of the same name) and the famous Knight Templar called Geoffrey de Charney, who was preceptor of Normandy and was burned alongside Grand Master Jacques de Molay as a relapsed heretic in 1314, three quarters of a century earlier.Īt the time of the 1355 exhibition, Henry de Poitiers, bishop of Troyes, conducted an inquiry into the cloth, concluding that it was a ‘fraud’ which had been ‘cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed’. Our first definite knowledge of the shroud is an event in around AD 1355, when it was put on show in the tiny French village of Lirey, in Champagne. The history of the long sheet falls into two categories: what is known, and what people have speculated. So, from a historical and scientific perspective: what is the shroud - and what isn’t it? Pope John Paul II called it ‘a mirror of the Gospel’, while Popes Benedict XVI and Francis have described it as ‘an icon’. The Catholic Church has made no miraculous claims for the object. The details of the sepia images are rather indistinct, and it was only in 1898, when a lawyer named Secondo Pia photographed the cloth, that the world was able to see the man’s horrific injuries, which showed up extraordinarily clearly on Pia’s photographic negatives. Or, more precisely, to see the images on the ivory-coloured fabric, which seem to depict faint life-size brown impressions of the front and back of a man. ![]() Last time the intensely controversial textile was brought out, in 2010, over 2.5 million people poured into the cathedral to see it. Inside the 15-century cathedral, an ancient, stained, and burned piece of medieval linen was removed from its airtight, bulletproof case and put on display. Last week something rather unusual happened in the quiet Italian city of Turin.
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