The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death
GARY VIKAN
(PEGASUS BOOKS, 304 PP, £22)
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Gary Vikan is a highly respected Byzantine art historian who was ­director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and before that based at the Byzantine Studies centre at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC. He has specialised not only in pilgrimage art and relics, but also in the authentication of museum objects, and he first became interested in the Shroud of Turin in 1981. The Shroud had been displayed in 1978 and Ian Wilson’s book The Turin Shroud, defending its genuineness, came out in the same year. I argued against Wilson in my inaugural lecture at King’s College London, published in 1980, and I now learn that Vikan planned an exhibition and conference with the title “The Scholar Looks at the Shroud” at Dumbarton Oaks in 1983.