Naturally, the most intriguing aspect of the shroud is the image. What caused it? No one knows. There are numerous burial cloths of that era involving the same burial rites using the same chemicals and ointments, but no images.

Close inspection of the image indicates that each fibril of the linen is independently stained which means each fibril would have had to have been colored separately, one by one. This would be impossible for an artist to accomplish in any other era than the late 20th century and is extremely unlikely to have been accomplished in this day and age even with the medical analyses already recorded to use as guidelines. It is extremely unlikely that even an artist of today could fool a team of professional scientists and experienced physicians even if the artist had at their disposal the necessary machinery it would take to create such an image, much less an artist from the 13th or 14th century that would not have known about serum albumen since it is only visible under ultra-violet light. For a more in-depth explanation, see Dr. Heller's summation at the end of the guided tour.

Some claim to know how the image was produced. Although they can describe the process that might have been used in creating the image, there have been no images produced that are comparable to the perfection of the shroud. One of the most interesting and absurd hypotheses involves a scenario in which the forger presumably treated the cloth with chemicals and then placed it in a dark room with a hole in a wall through which sunlight could enter and "expose" the cloth. The process would have involved standing a cadaver, painted white, in the sun for four days outside of the hole in the wall in order to transfer the image to the shroud through the hole, or "lens." Since there is also a dorsal image of the shroud victim, the cadaver must have been spun and allowed to cook in the sun for another four days to acquire the back side image. It doesn't take a mental gymnast to perceive what that cadaver would have looked like after eight days in the sun (or even eight days in the shade for that matter). This process also would have involved moving the cadaver perfectly in synch with the movement of the sun across the sky to avoid blurring the image on the cloth. Even if such a process could have worked, the cadaver would have undergone enough disfiguring changes over the course of eight days in the sun that a team of qualified physicians would have been able to spot the forgery instantly. To visit the web site that supports this claim, go to: web.mountain.net/~havoc/rational/turinimg.html.

One of the aspects of the shroud that defies human reproduction, is its 3-dimensional properties. When analyzed with a VP-8 computer analyzer, the image on the shroud produces a 3-dimensional "relief" image as if viewing a topographical map of a human. Neither paintings, photos, nor drawings produce 3-D effects as produced by the shroud. See "Photos" and "3-D" in the Table of Contents.