MORE ON THE SHROUD OF TURIN (via Archaeologica News). If there were an award for obscure headlines, this one would certainly be a contender:

Turin Shroud Back Side Shows Face
By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

April 11, 2004 � The ghostly image of a man's face has emerged on the back side of the Turin Shroud, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the crucifixion, according to new digital imaging processing techniques.

The discovery adds new complexity to one of the most controversial relics in Christendom, venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake.

The study, which will be published on Tuesday by one of the journals of the Institute of Physics, the Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics, examined the back surface of the famous handwoven linen.

[...]

"As I saw the pictures in the book, I was caught by the perception of a faint image on the back surface of the shroud. I thought that perhaps there was much more that wasn't visible to the naked eye," Giulio Fanti, professor of Mechanical and Thermic Measurements at Padua University and main author of the study, told Discovery News.

[...]

The presence of a face on both sides of the shroud would seem an obvious feature in case of a fake: when making a print onto a cloth, paint soaks the cloth's fibers reaching also the back side.

"This is not the case of the Shroud. On both sides, the face image is superficial, involving only the outermost linen fibers. When a cross-section of the fabric is made, one extremely superficial image appears above and one below, but there is nothing in the middle. It is extremely difficult to make a fake with these features," Fanti said.

According to the scientist, this double superficiality could be crucial to answer the central, unanswered question of how the image of that man got onto the cloth.

[...]

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

UPDATE (14 April): Mark Goodacre has noted links to an abstract of the peer-reviewed article and instructions for accessing the whole article. You can also download it as a PDF file without registering and you can read a longer summary here. I've downloaded the article but at the moment I'm heavily preoccupied with some counterfactual philology (don't ask) and I don't have time to read it. But if any readers happen to be specialists in this type of optics, please drop me a note, tell me who you are, and let me know what you think of it.