Turin Shroud [antikvár]

Introduction Irony and Inspiration The exquisite, perfect irony would have appealed to Leonardo da Vinci. It certainly appealed to us . . . When the Catholic nun Sister Mary Michael demonstrated against the filming of The Da Vinci Code — based on Dan Brown's phenomenal bestseller — at Lincoln Cathedral in August 2005, declaring during her twelve-hour prayer vigil that it was 'against the essence of what we [Christians] believe'^, she was clutching a photograph of the face of the man on the Shroud of Turin. The irony is that if we are right, and of course we believe we are, then the image she held so fervently to her bosom was not that of her beloved Jesus Christ at all, but actually the image of the old trouble-maker himself- Leonardo da Vinci. Sister Mary Michael's holy talisman is - as we hope to demonstrate in this book — nothing less than the image of the ultimate freethinkers' hero, and now the inspi-rarion for the most-read book of the early twenty-first century, the very one that Sister Mary Michael was demonstrating against. (In fact, new and exciting evidence that Leonardo is the man on the Shroud is presented for the first time in this revised and updated edition.) Even in the twenty-first century, da Vinci clearly has a lot to teach us. There is another, similar irony in the presentation of full-sized reproductions of the front and back images of the Shroud in a side chapel of the important church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, facing