3
I don’t. And I’m pretty sure the editors of TIME knew that it wasn’t back in 1998 when they put it (a detail from the Shroud of Turin) on their magazine’s cover.
The linen of the Shroud had been Carbon 14 dated to AD 1260-1390 ten years earlier, in 1988. And as it turns out, the Shroud appears for the first time in historical documents in AD 1357 in a small town in France (Lirey, not Remulak).
So you would think it would be obvious, and we (the world at large) would by now have gotten over the Shroud of Turin.
No so. More than 2,000,000 people, including the Pope, will make pilgrimage to Turin between April 10th and May 23rd this year, to see the Shroud on display (for the first time in a decade) in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
Want to hear the whole story behind the Shroud of Turin? Come on down to the Walters on April 2nd, at 6 pm.
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.