In a court of law, facial superimposition couldn’t be used to prove an identification; it could be used only to exclude one—to say “No, that face can’t possibly fit that skull.” If the Shroud face hadn’t aligned with the Avignon skull—the scaled-up skull—I’d have concluded once and for all that the portrait in Turin and the bones in France belonged to different men. But this was a better fit than I could have imagined, and Emily Craig’s confident assertion—that a good artist can draw exactly to scale—no longer struck me as artistic license, as illustrator’s exaggeration.
I fetched my tape measure, and Miranda and I took measurements from the Shroud to compare with those from the bones. We couldn’t get as many measurements as I’d hoped, because the Shroud’s image was vague, the landmarks tough to pinpoint. It was like examining a newspaper photo through a magnifying glass: the closer you look, the less you see. Still, the few solid measurements we managed to get—overall stature, femur length, nasal breadth, nasal length—fit well, once we scaled up the bone measurements. Even the skeleton’s leggy, storklike proportions—the short trunk and long limbs—were accurately rendered on the Shroud. “Everything’s the same, just ten percent bigger,” Miranda said. “Why do you suppose he did that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted it to look more impressive.”
She laughed. “Maybe he was getting paid by the foot.”
I laughed, too. “We can probably never prove it, but I feel sure. This guy on the Shroud is our guy from the palace.”
“But who is our guy?” she said. “Is it Eckhart, or is it Jesus?”
“That, Miranda, is the million-dollar question.”
CHAPTER 14
A5 Motorway, Italian Alps
The Present
“IN-TERESTING.” MIRANDA WAS SCROLLING DOWN the screen of her iPad as the car careened through a curve near the Mont Blanc Tunnel on our drive back to Avignon.
“How can you read on these roads without getting carsick? I’d’ve thrown up before we got out of Turin if I tried that.”
“It’s a gift,” she said. “I have many. Now shut up and drive. And listen. Three interest items about the Shroud. Interest item number one: In the 1990s, a prominent microscopist named Walter McCrone found red ochre in the image on the Shroud—and vermilion pigment in the so-called bloodstains.”
“That would explain why those are bright red,” I said. “I was gonna circle back to that at some point. Since when is dried blood cherry red? Every death scene I see, dried blood’s almost black.”
“Right. The point is, this microscopist McCrone seems to support Emily’s position. Interest item number two: When the Shroud first surfaced in Lirey, France, a bishop in a nearby town got suspicious. He poked around, asked a lot of questions, and eventually wrote to Avignon to warn the pope that it was a fake—‘cunningly painted,’ he said—created to draw pilgrims to Lirey. What’s the catchphrase these days? ‘Faith-based tourism’? Ha. This sounds like a case of fake-based tourism.”
“Did this sleuth of a bishop happen to finger Giotto as the cunning painter?”
“He did not,” she said, “but I’m glad you asked, because that brings us to interest item number three. In June of 2011, an Italian art historian, one Luciano Buso, announced that he’d found an artist’s signature—guess whose?—hidden in the Shroud. Somewhere around the face, supposedly.” She unfastened her seat belt, and the car began beeping in alarm. She clambered out of her seat, squeezing her way into the back.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting the Shroud.” She wormed her way back to the front, belted in, and began unrolling the giant print. One end of it flopped halfway across the windshield, and I nearly ran off the road before I managed to bat it away.
“Are you crazy? There are so many better reasons to die than this.” I pulled onto the shoulder and parked.
“Sorry; it got away from me for a second there.” She hopped out of the car, laid the print on the hood, and unrolled it as far as the face. “Come help me look.” She pored over the image, squinting and frowning. “I don’t see a damn thing that looks like ‘Giotto.’ Do you?”
“No,” I said, “but that swirly bit around the eye looks kinda like a doggie.”
She retrieved her iPad from the floorboard and did further searching. “Okay, here’s the picture this art historian gave to the media. A close-up of the neck, showing the signature.” She enlarged the picture and studied the screen. “Hmm.” Then she studied our immense, high-resolution print again. “Hmmmmm.”
“Hmmmmm, what? I’m assuming the hmmmmm is important.”
She showed me the screen. “In his print, just above that double wrinkle in the neck, can you kinda-sorta see a potential ‘Giotto’?”
I was surprised by what I saw. “Yeah, I kinda-sorta can. It’s grainy, but I see something that could be a lowercase cursive g and a couple round bits that might be o’s.”
She stared at the mammoth print. “But now look at ours. Notice anything funny?”
“It’s really different. I see blotches and splotches, but everything looks all vague and random.”
“I think he’s cranked up the contrast a lot in his picture. Not in the whole image; just in that part of the neck. Looks like he’s Photoshopped it to highlight what he wants us to see.” Then she groaned loudly. “Oh, good grief.”