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5.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Gino Moretto's "The Shroud: A Guide", September 28, 2000
This review is from: The Shroud: A Guide (Paperback)
Gino Moretto's guide to the Shroud of Turin has no equal in the vast historical, scientific, devotional, and popular literature on this fascinating visual document of Western culture. This is the book for anyone, whether skeptic or believer, curious about this strange and beautiful object that has so captured the human imagination over the past several hundred years. Moretto is the former Secretary of the Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud and International Center for Sindonology (as the discipline devoted to study of the Shroud is known). He is also former Editorial Secretary of the journal, Sindon, which publishes scientific and historical articles on the famous relic. His knowledge of the Shroud is interdisciplinary and comprehensive. With this inexpensive and accessible publication he opens to a much wider readership the basic visual and scientific facts related to the Shroud.
In four major sections he covers the essentials related to the relic: first, its known history; second, the various scientific studies applied to determine its nature and origin; third, an analysis of the imagery imprinted on the surface of the textile; and, last, a summary of statements made by ecclesiastical authorities on the relic and the scientific findings related to it. Moretto is an advocate of the Shroud, that he makes clear, but his guide aims to present just the facts as they are known. He leaves the pronouncements and judgments to others. And he lets the reader decide for him or herself about the antiquity of the relic.
The book has become something of an international best seller and has appeared with editions in six languages, recently in this English version. Since the Shroud is most of all a visual thing, perhaps the most visual of all Christian relics, Moretto has taken this characteristic of the object as a cue to his approach in the book. He presents the analysis visually, with short textual elements attached almost as captions to the nearly 200 photographs, illustrations, and diagrams, most of them in color. The visual presentation drives the theme of the book.
Perhaps the chief glory of this handy book is the double-page color foldout of the Shroud. Here Moretto provides the viewer with an objective reading of the imagery on the relic. This includes not only the frontal and dorsal views of the human figure but also the various stains, holes, patches, mendings, and scorch and water marks. Here the visual elements are presented more legibly than can be seen on the object itself and labeled with didactic explanations. Here, in all its subtlety, one can see how the Shroud is rightly a thing to be seen.
In attempting to capture the material history and presence of the relic, Moretto has eschewed tendentiousness and opened this amazing cloth to the view of an vastly larger audience than has heretofore been possible. He has sought to provide entrée into the world of the Shroud and its history to the broadest range of readers. He has admirably succeeded.
Moretto's companion volume on the worldly political history of the relic and its possession by the Dukes of Savoy (later Kings of Italy), "Sindone: la storia, 1416-2000," appeared in 2000 (Elledici, Turin). It is to be hoped that this study, too, will eventually appear in an English edition. The Shroud can be studied in many ways and its recent confrontations with science have made it something of a modern touchstone in the perennial debate between religion and modern scientific/technological culture initiated by Galileo at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As a serious cultural and historical document the Shroud needs to be studied more, and we can hope that Moretto's important contribution will help stimulate future inquiries at the same time it satisfies the curiosity of the layperson.
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