Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince: Leonardo da Vinci, the Church and the Turin Shroud

In this fully revised and updated edition, the bestselling authors of The Templar Revelation present new and compelling evidence linking Leonardo da Vinci with the forgery of Christianity's most famous relic. For centuries the Turin Shroud was believed to be Christ's authentic burial cloth, miraculously imprinted with his image -- but in 1988 carbon dating revealed it is a medieval- or Renaissance-era forgery. However, authors Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince realized that the 1988 discovery prompted even more questions:

The image seems to be a photograph -- so could the Turin Shroud actually be the world's first photograph?

If the face of the man on the Shroud is not Jesus', whose is it?

Who had the sheer audacity to create what would become an infamous relic of Christianity, faking even Christ's holy, redemptive blood?

Whoever did this was not only a genius but also a heretic....

After more than a decade of research, Picknett and Prince have accumulated evidence that shows not only was the forger of the Turin Shroud none other than Leonardo da Vinci but also that he used his own face for that of Christ. The Turin Shroud is, among other things, a five-hundred-year-old photograph of Leonardo da Vinci. Could Christianity's greatest relic in fact be an attempt to undermine the religion itself?

In this revision of their 1994 book, London-based writers Prince and Picknett jump on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon by claiming that the face on the Turin shroud is not Jesus but Da Vinci himself. Based on their research into the carbon-dating of the Shroud and their own re-creation of the circumstances under which the Shroud could have been created, they conclude that the Shroud is man-made, comes from no earlier than the 14th century, and that Leonardo (whom they claim invented photography) used photographic technology for the basis for the painted image. For their research, the authors compared Da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi with the image on the shroud and found that it matched up perfectly with the man on the Shroud. While the authors can provide no proof that Da Vinci used his face as the model for the face on the Shroud, their research claims a never-before acknowledged connection between Leonardo and the Shroud. Unfortunately, the authors’ fast-paced and detailed detective work results in little more than speculation about Da Vinci’s relationship to the Shroud. Only slightly provocative, the book tediously searches for new clues in an old case now shrouded in indifference.