Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 10

  Following the testing of the shroud in 1988, scientists and investigators from around the globe scrutinized the published results. Aside from some statistical problems, there was no evidence that the pretreatment or equipment could be blamed. This meant that if an error had been introduced, the problem had to lie with the sample itself.

  Recently two important leads have been uncovered. First, Russian scientists have shown in their Moscow laboratory that the fire of 1532 could have induced a serious error of perhaps some five hundred years by intruding extra carbon into the actual chemical structure of the fibers. Second, an investigator in the United States has discovered the presence of what he calls a “bio-plastic coating” created by a fungal/bacterial symbiotic relationship. This coating actually covers the very fibers from the corner from which the radiocarbon samples were removed. Experiments demonstrated that the pretreatment commonly used in the laboratories for preparing samples for testing might not have removed this serious contaminant.

  Moreover, the sample was taken from what is called the “Raes’ Corner,” named after the Belgian textile expert Dr. Gilbert Raes, who studied the area in 1973. Evidence for worn corners requiring a medieval repair is inherent in the fact that what appear to be “patches” on each corner of the “side-strip” side of the shroud are, in fact, cutaway portions of the shroud itself that have been stitched down to the Holland backing cloth, added in the spring of 1534. So the sample extracted could have been affected when the cloth was repaired in 1534, and therefore the carbon-14 date might have been altered by the admixture of newer threads. In this latter case the relationship of the sample to the cloth as a whole would not be precisely known until a scientifically controlled date was obtained from another area of the shroud.

  All these scenarios would provide a source of more modern carbon that would seriously skew the date of the cloth, making it appear younger than it actually is. When research is finally completed, the truth will probably be a combination of some of these findings.

  Despite all the investigations and tests conducted, there still remain some very puzzling questions about this cloth. It clearly bears the image of a man who was crucified, but is that image natural or is it an artist’s painting? The preponderance of accumulated evidence supports the natural-causes explanation rather than the artist’s painting, but this has not yet been scientifically verified. If it is an artist’s image, who made it and why? How could a medieval forger create a negative impression before the science of photography was developed?

  Why do a majority of physicians and forensic pathologists around the world who have specialized in the study of the shroud come away deeply impressed with the accuracy of the body stance, the blood flows, the technical medical nuances of crucifixion, and the amazing anatomical precision not yet known to medicine? Does this boldly imply that some fourteenth-century artist experimented by crucifying hapless victims until he got it right?

  Some of these mysteries may never be solved, making it difficult for some to reject the Shroud of Turin as a fake, but allowing others to continue to venerate it as an authentic holy object.

  LOCATION: Cathedral of St. John the Baptist (Royal Chapel of the Shroud), Turin, Italy.

  Footnote

  *In 1949 W. F. Libby invented an indirect method of counting radiocarbon breakdown (called beta counting) by a means somewhat analogous to a Geiger counter. That method would have required a piece of cloth the size of a handkerchief, obviously too much. The owners of the shroud preferred to wait. In 1977 Dr. Harry E. Gove and his colleagues invented a direct method of counting individual C-14 isotopes. This is known today as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and allows the use of considerably smaller samples—in this case postage stamp-size pieces of cloth.

  THE BLOOD OF SAINT JANUARIUS

  DATE: 305 (by tradition).

  WHAT IT IS: The liquefying blood of a saint who lived some seventeen hundred years ago.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The blood is kept in a small glass vial. In its usual state, the blood is dried, solid, and dark. As a liquid, it has a color ranging from purplish to bright red.

  The practice of extracting from deceased holy persons body parts or fluids to be venerated for the purpose of inducing miracles was well established in A.D. 305, when an obscure Italian bishop named Januarius died. When the bleeding of corpses began is not known exactly, but this practice would reach its height in certain parts of Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

  Letters, journals, books, and church records chronicle numerous attempts to draw blood from holy people hours, days, even years after they expired, often with successful results. Typically, someone would open a vein or bleed an arm of the cadaver with the hope of obtaining blood. Witnesses sometimes claimed that before blood was drawn, the corpse would yield perspiration from the forehead or exude a pleasant smell. Sometimes the volume of blood that poured forth from a cut on a body from which life had been extinguished several days earlier was so great that witnesses dabbed cloths in the blood and handed them out in the belief that they would afford the recipient protection and good fortune. In one extreme case, the body of a priest was disinterred in Italy in 1750, nearly four years after his death. A witness, Father Joseph Landi, wrote of the astonishment of those present upon seeing a body “as entire, flexible and beautiful as on the day of his death.” Just as astonishing must have been what happened shortly after, for when the corpse was bled, Father Landi recorded, the witnesses noticed “bright blood to gush forth from the incision.”

  Although the liquefaction of saints’ blood is a prodigy that has been well documented, some skeptics doubt that the blood actually came from their bodies. Interestingly, exhibitions of the blood relics on the feast days of these saints have regularly been marked by liquefactions. Of all the blood relics, the most famous is that of Saint Januarius (San Gennaro), long celebrated by throngs of people who have come to witness its miracle. Not much is known about this late third-century Italian—not his family background, not his early years, not what he looked like. About all that is known about him is that he was dedicated to the service of God and that he died a martyr a long time ago.

  Januarius was a bishop in Beneventum (now Benevento), a town in central Italy, at a time when Christians suffered harsh persecution under the Roman emperor Diocletian. Diocletian was a strong ruler who made sweeping governmental reforms and brought stability to the empire. But during his reign the treatment of Christians, who refused to worship him, was severe.

  Among the Christian clerics who fell victim to the religious persecution was the bishop Januarius. Presumably, he declined to renounce his religious faith and was executed, probably by beheading. According to some accounts, as his corpse was being conveyed to Naples, the town that later made him its patron saint, it was bled.

  The liquefying blood in its vessel.

  Of course it stretches the imagination not only to believe that preserved today in a glass vial is the blood of a third-century bishop, but further, to accept that this blood, dry and solid in a vessel, liquefies several times each year on the same days. An amazing proposition to be sure, but that is the long and documented history of the “Blood of Saint Januarius.”

  The Blood of Saint Januarius is said to liquefy at least eighteen times each year. The event occurs on the feast day of Saint Januarius in September and during the next seven days, on the sixteenth of December, on the first Saturday in May, and during each of the next eight days. The blood relic’s history has demonstrated that there is not necessarily a direct correlation between liquefaction and heat and light, for the dried blood has liquefied in dim lighting and on December days when the temperature was below freezing, and has remained in a solid state on hot summer days. The “feast of the miracle” is usually carried out in a ceremony where the vial is displayed before shouting worshipers, invoking the Lord to work the miracle. Liquefaction does not always take place in the normal interval, sometimes happening prematurely or protractedly. Indeed
, deviant liquefaction, or failure to liquefy at all, has traditionally been regarded as an omen of catastrophe or misfortune. Believers in the blood miracle have attributed various disasters to the unsuccessful exhibitions they followed.

  The blood has some curious properties. In its hardened state, its volume and weight may at times vary considerably, and the liquefactions seem to have their own “personalities,” sometimes lethargic, other times animated. Sensational phenomena associated with the blood’s liquefactions have been reported. The eminent theological scholar Herbert Thurston wrote, “It is stated, though I have as yet met with no quite convincing evidence of the fact, that at the moment when the liquefaction takes place . . . a slab of stone at Pozzuoli, supposed to be connected with the martyrdo of the Saint, is seen to redden and to be covered with moisture.”

  Three Italian scientists reported in the October 10, 1991, issue of Nature magazine that by mixing chalk and iron chloride they produced a gel that liquefied when it was shaken and hardened when it was not disturbed. Medieval apothecaries would have known how to concoct such gels, they claimed, and therefore could have made what became the so-called blood relics. The scientists noted that modern scientific testing would reveal the composition of the blood relic, but that the Roman Catholic Church prohibits this.

  At any rate, those who look upon the Saint Januarius blood relic with skepticism should consider that it does have characteristics—observed, confirmed, and documented by dubious observers as well as believers—that seem to defy scientific explanation. Perhaps its mysteries will one day be conclusively solved. But for now, and for hundreds of years already, the inexplicable, perhaps miraculous behavior of the dark substance in the small glass vial has led many to believe that it does indeed have some type of holy connection.

  LOCATION: Naples Cathedral, Naples, Italy.

  THE RUBENS VASE

  DATE: Circa 350.

  WHAT IT IS: A rare Byzantine work of art that through the centuries has often narrowly escaped being shattered and has disappeared on several occasions, only to resurface in another time and place. It has a distinguished list of owners and is named after one of them, the renowned seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The vase is a 9-inch-high cameo sculpted of solid agate. Carved in the relief are sneering horned satyrs and winding vines.

  In 1941 an antique vase was brought up for auction in a collection of art objects in New York City. Experts suspected it had belonged to, among other notables, the celebrated English author William Beckford and Peter Paul Rubens. Furthermore, it seemed to have a very dramatic history—it had frequently been pillaged or had disappeared but always, astonishingly, reemerged.

  There was no definitive proof for any of these conjectures, however. Such proof of an association with legendary people or events would cause its value to soar, but without it, the object would remain a curiosity. The ideal situation for a perspicacious buyer would be to secure but not publicize the proof until the object was in the collector’s possession. How could proof be found?

  At the time of the 1941 auction, Marvin Chauncey Ross, a museum curator, had recently examined an illustrated book about William Beckford’s residence, Fonthill Giffard. Beckford, famous for his 1780s occult novel published in French, Vathek, in 1796 had architect James Wyatt build for him in Wiltshire a Gothic-style home that became England’s most sumptuous private residence. An antiquarian of sorts, Beckford collected interesting old artwork and books.

  On the frontispiece of the Fonthill Giffard book, Ross observed an object illustrated in the lower right-hand corner. After close examination Ross came to a startling conclusion. It was none other than the vase being auctioned. Further research yielded a revealing letter written by someone to whom Beckford had shown his collection. The writer mentioned “a vase composed of one entire block of Chalcedonian onyx,” which Beckford had speculated was “one of the greatest curiosities in existence.” Of the vase, the writer noted that Beckford had also said that Peter Paul Rubens “‘made a drawing of it, for it was pawned in his time for a very large sum. And I possess an engraving of his drawing.’ And opening a portfolio he immediately presented it to my wondering eyes.”

  Voilà! Not only had Ross found that Beckford had possessed the vase, but he himself had linked it to Rubens. And with that came to light more stories about the vase, because Rubens had written about it in his own letters. From inventories of royal art collections dating back to the fourteenth century, Ross was also able to identify other owners of the vase, and the dramatic story of this remarkable object unfolded.

  The vase had been sculpted in the mid-fourth century, probably in a royal workshop of a Byzantine emperor. Little is actually known about it until the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, when Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, was captured. The vase was probably found in a royal palace and, with other objects, taken clandestinely to France.

  The Rubens Vase

  Around 1368 the vase came into the possession of the duke of Anjou, who stored it in a medieval fortress. When he died his brother, King Charles V of France, inherited the vase. Charles V, a respected ruler known as “the Wise,” supported the arts and established a royal library in the Louvre, which would become France’s national library, the Bibliothèque Nationale. The vase was displayed in the Louvre.

  Charles V died in September 1380. Thirty-five years later, his widow-cousin, Jeanne de Bourbon, bestowed much of his royal artwork on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Among these works was the Byzantine vase, which the prelates sold for a pittance near the end of the sixteenth century to help the financially troubled church.

  In 1619 the vase was inconspicuously offered for sale in a Paris flea market. The painter Peter Paul Rubens recognized its superb craftsmanship and bought it for a rather healthy sum. Less than a decade later he himself became financially strapped, and he was forced to sell the vase. He found a buyer in India, said to be none less than the Mogul emperor himself, Jahāngīr. But the vase never made it to Jahāngīr —or India—because the ship on which it was journeying was wrecked off Australian shores. Legend has it that a handful of the crew went to nearby Java for help and when they returned to the site of the shipwreck they found that more than two hundred passengers had died fighting over the treasures aboard the marooned vessel. The Rubens Vase disappeared at this time.

  What happened to the vase or into whose hands it fell next is not known, but Beckford purchased it in 1818.

  Beckford added the vase to his collection at Fonthill Giffard, where he lived in virtual seclusion. But when he moved in 1822, he sold it to his son-in-law, the duke of Hamilton. This was fortunate, because shortly afterward the 250-foot central tower of Fonthill Giffard toppled, demolishing most of the building; it is almost certain that the vase would have been destroyed had it still been there.

  The duke of Hamilton owned the vase until the 1880s, when it was purchased for almost eighteen hundred pounds (about $8,760) by Sir Francis Cook. Cook displayed it in the early 1900s at the Burlington House in London; four years later a catalog of Cook’s collection of art objects was published, and it included the vase. At this time it was called the Hamilton Vase, after its previous owner, and it was strongly conjectured to have been owned by Rubens. But without definitive proof, this was still conjecture.

  In 1925 Henry Walters, an art expert whose father, William, established an art museum in Baltimore in 1871, purchased the vase for eighty-five hundred dollars. Walters died six years later; in 1941 his widow put up for auction pieces from their personal collection.

  It was at this time that Marvin Chauncey Ross, sitting in the New York City offices of Parke-Bernet, knew something the other bidders didn’t: the vase’s sensational history—its ownership by French royalty and Rubens and Beckford, the sale to the Grand Mogul of Delhi, and the shipwreck.

  But history aside, Ross, as a scholar and connoisseur of art, also appreciated the vase for what it was: a work of art unlike any other obje
ct known from the Byzantine world.

  A large, richly carved hard stone vessel, the Rubens Vase showed Byzantine technical audacity at its most sublime level. Its extremely refined and sophisticated craftsmanship and lavish use of materials reflected the splendor of Byzantine court life, which was without equal in the Mediterranean world for about a thousand years. There are other surviving objects from the Byzantine Empire that possess some of the qualities of the Rubens Vase, but its closest relatives are really quite different, and that is very unusual. There are hard stones cut in the shape of vessels but none anywhere near as elaborate as the Rubens. Another surviving vessel from the late Roman world was cut as elaborately as the Rubens Vase, but it was made of glass, not agate. Although undoubtedly other agate cameo vases like the Rubens Vase were made—people ordinarily don’t make just one of something—the fragility of these agate vessels made it unlikely that any would endure to the twentieth century. The Rubens Vase apparently is one of a kind.

  Ross sat apprehensively in the audience with a trustee of the gallery where he was the curator. With the approval of the gallery’s board of directors, they were permitted to bid up to five thousand dollars for the vase, although they didn’t expect the bidding to go nearly that high.

  To Ross’s surprise, the bidding went just that high—and higher. Devastated, he sank his head into his hands and lamented, not bothering to follow the bidding to its conclusion. On the train ride home he sat depressed. When the train arrived at its destination, Ross’s companion, the trustee, sent him into shock when he revealed that while Ross had his head buried he had raised their ante card, bidding five hundred dollars of his own money over their official allotment. Ross was euphoric; they had brought the Rubens treasure home after all.