This award-winning book (2021 Roland H. Bainton Prize) is an original and multifaceted approach to a well-known relic. Casper examines the Shroud as an artful image from 1578–1694 under the House of Savoy. In five chapters he presents a clear understanding of how the Shroud became an important relic, what the Shroud meant to devotees, and the implications of Shroud copies.
The author approaches the subject from a secular vantage point, acknowledging that there have been controversies about authenticity long before the Savoy's ownership and long after the seventeenth century. Readers will understand what the Shroud meant to the faithful during the height of its status and exactly how it was considered genuine art.
Casper argues that this relic has been marginalized by the hierarchy of art history, partially because of the faint monochromatic blood stains, which render it difficult to discern the image. To understand the Shroud as an artful relic he admits traditional art history approaches will not suffice. Primary source material points to deus artifex as the creator of the linen with markings of Christ's blood and bodily tortures. These sources both defend its legitimacy as a relic and as an artwork.
The first three chapters examine the Shroud in Turin as veneration and enthusiasm built and peaked. Casper explores the Savoy's devotion to the relic coupled with Carlo Borromeo's four trips to venerate the Shroud, which stimulated a robust public following. Particularly intriguing is the role of the Jesuits’ spiritual exercise in composition of place, imagining a reconstruction of the Passion while fully engaging one's senses. This devotional technique coincided with the Shroud's rise in popularity at the end of the sixteenth century. Ostentations of the Shroud produced a powerful devotional connection to the Passion and resurrection. The Shroud's relationship to Passion and blood relics helped secured it as a divinely created object.
Language used to describe the Shroud echoes late 1500s and 1600s art theory, utilizing descriptive terms like ombra, primo bozzo, macchia, and sbozzatura. Literary sources portray the Shroud as art made by God in the same way that human artists imbue lifelikeness in sculpture and painting. This connection of giving life form and activating the depicted matter for meaning-making is key to understanding the way viewers and writers considered the Shroud legitimate art. Writers described the technique of imparting the bloodstains on the linen as subtractive painting occurring during the resurrection.
The final two chapters consider the impact of numerous Shroud copies made for the faithful in printed and painted form. The relationship between the viewer and copy is carefully considered in these chapters, as the power of the relic was not diluted by copies. Reproductions were not valued necessarily by their exactness in detail to the original, but were authenticated by pressing them to the Shroud, a practice that is well documented in the primary sources. As secondary relics, the copies were not simulacrum, but double signifiers.
Casper focuses on Rome's church of the Santissimo Sudario high altar with a life-size replica of the Shroud, enveloped by an ornate multimedia ensemble. This copy of the Shroud functioned in a tripart way as an icon, copy, and relic, in full complement with existing Roman Passion relics. Casper situates the Santissimo Sudario copy in the context of Rome's revered Veronica. As the Shroud gained popularity, the Veronica, possibly with the original missing, lost prestige as more copies circulated. Not all copies of relics remained on equal terms.
Casper makes a compelling argument with supportive evidence that the Shroud was considered art, at least in the seventeenth century. Much of the textual evidence was biased, undoubtedly to appease the Savoy and the post-Tridentine church. His inquisitiveness about the juncture of artifice and authenticity, relics, and icons stimulates questions about art theory, then and now, as well as what scholars and the public consider art. Casper's book opens up further discussion and application not only in art and religious history, but also about semiotics and meaning-making. And his curiosity about the Shroud is catching. Who knew there was a copy in New Jersey?
