Was Turin Shroud Faked by Leonardo da Vinci ?

·An upcoming television documentary claims that the Turin Shroud was faked by Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci using pioneering photographic techniques and a sculpture of his own head.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5706640/Turin-Shroud-is-face-of-Leonardo-da-Vinci.html

A study of facial features suggests the image on the relic is actually da Vinci's own face which could have been projected into the cloth.
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American artist Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York who came to prominence in the 1980s when she matched the face of the Mona Lisa to a Leonardo self-portrait, used computer scans to show that the face on the Shroud has the same dimensions to that of da Vinci.
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The claim is made in a Channel Five documentary, to be shown on Wednesday night, that describes how da Vinci could have scorched his facial features on to the linen of the Shroud using a sculpture of his face and a camera obscura – an early photographic device.
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Lynn Picknett, a Shroud researcher and author, said: “The faker of the shroud had to be a heretic, someone with no fear of faking Jesus’ holy redemptive blood. “He had to have a grasp of anatomy and he had to have at his fingertips a technology which would completely fool everyone until the 20th century.
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The programme explains the theory that da Vinci's forgery was commissioned to replace an earlier version that was exposed as a poor fake, which had been bought by the powerful Savoy family in 1453 only to disappear for 50 years. When it returned to public view, it was hailed as a genuine relic, and experts say it was actually the artist's convincing replica.

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