Nickell’s bas-relief #2

Athetotheist wrote: ↑Thu Jun 15, 2023 12:51 am[Replying to otseng in post #2655

Interestingly, Nickell does not show in the video the final image of the cloth pressed flat, as what we would expect to see. Instead, he shows a a picture taken of cloth pressed against the face. If he had actually showed the cloth stretched flat, the image distortions would’ve refuted the claim a bas-relief was used.

We do see the face on the Turin cloth pressed flat and it has none of the side-of-head distortion it should have if it surrounded a body.

Let’s do a simple thought experiment. Press a cloth against the entire surface of a face on a bas-relief, and then you put a dot at the center of each eye. Then flatten the cloth and measure the distance between the eyes – distance E1. Now take a ruler and place it over the bas-relief and measure the distance between the eyes – distance E2. E1 would be longer than E2 because the cloth would not be straight when pressed against the face, but would go up and down to conform to the eye socket and the bridge of nose. This distance discrepancy would be true for any two distance between the face that involves curvature of the face. These distance differences would result in facial distortions.

Let’s see what Nickell did. First he pressed the cloth completely flat against the face and applied a stain.

“when you finish you will have the cloth tightly molded to the bas-relief it will fit it rather like a mask”

Then he stained it. And then they show this image:

There is no way the above image is what you would get if you took the cloth off the bas-relief and then pressed it flat. Rather, the only way to get that image is if you took a photo of the stained cloth while it was on the bas-relief. Then put the photo on a frame, and then apply staples to the edge to fool people to think it was actually a cloth.

Look at Nickell’s model above. Though it’s not Jesus (which is by itself strange since isn’t he try to replicate the TS?)

He was demonstrating a replication of a technique.

I will grant that the technique “Nickell produced an image of similar color and tone to the face on the shroud” (as mentioned in 15:48 of the video). But that’s about it. The bas-relief doesn’t really explain anything. Again, if you stain a cloth on a bas-relief, there would be severe distortions.

A bas-relief does, but simply staining a cloth pressed against it does not. The reason there is depth encoding is there is a correlation between cloth to body distance and colored fiber density. Simply applying dabs on a bas-relief will not produce this.

….unless the cloth isn’t pressed all the way against the bas-relief.

Doesn’t make sense either. One would need to know the distance of the cloth to the body in order to have the proper coloring density. Nobody would go through this much trouble, even if they knew about the concept of depth encoding (which we didn’t even know about until the 1970s). And even though we know about the concept now, we don’t really know how to replicate this artistically.

The bas-relief sculpture would’ve had to make the body anatomically accurate, except for the fingers.

You’re forgetting about the enlongated face.

Yes, the enlongated face as well. Which further doesn’t make any sense. What was the artist trying to reproduce? A medically accurate body or a replication of Byzantine art? From an artistic point of view, it cannot have been both.

In the case of the authenticist view, it makes more sense. The image is from an anatomically correct body, but the second order distortions (long fingers, elongated face) are an imaging artifact.

I’m not talking about the dorsal and ventral images on the same side of the cloth. On the other side of the cloth, there is a faint image that correspond in the facial area with the front side.

First draft?

Doubtful since it doesn’t even look like a draft. Also, where we do have imaging, it matches the front side. Here’s the image again:

Angle encoding means there is a relationship between the angle of the cloth relative to the horizontal plane of the body and the image discoloration density. The more angle, the less imaging. So, for areas where the cloth is perpendicular to the ground, there is no imaging.

You don’t like the radiation hypothesis because it works only vertically and not omnidirectionally, but now you’re trying to make “angle encoding” do the same thing. You seem to have given up on the dematerializing body creating a vaccuum.

Never said I’ve given up on a dematerializing body. That is where the evidence leads to. And obviously a dematerializing body would cause a vacuum.

For radiation, there are two proposals for directionality – either vertically collimated or omnidirectional. I don’t accept the vertically collimated, but it still could be possible neutrons were emitted omnidirectionally.

I think all authenticists agree there is some sort of linear image formation involved. In order to take a picture of something, what we have to do is direct light through a lens. Without a lens, the only other way to have an image is like a laser where there is no light dispersion. So that is why vertically collimated is proposed.

Instead of radiation going from the point of origin to the cloth, another way to do it is the cloth goes to the point of origin and then interacts with it, which is what the cloth collapse theory proposes. No vertical collimation is required.

The cloth would collapse into the dematerializing body

And again, without a vaccuum this doesn’t account for the back image.

Since I’ve always stated there would be a vacuum, it would account for it.

Angle distortion explains the long fingers and second order distortion of facial proportions.

Then the long fingers aren’t an x-ray effect.

There’s two factors with the long fingers – angle encoding and x-ray effect.

Jesus’ head would have had to look like Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein’s monster for there to have been such a wide perpenticular area between the front and back.

Doing a rough experiment, it’s entirely possible for the shroud to cover the head and yet have the head gap with no imaging. I took a towel and covered my head and measured the distance from my chin to the back of my neck. Then I measured the distance from my chin to my eyes. Using a photograph of the TS, I measured the same distances. The ratio of chin to eye and chin to back of head on both are similar.

https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1124427#p1124427