The Turin Shroud
How Da Vinci Fooled History
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 best seller - 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
troublemaker 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 inspiration for the most read book
of the early twenty-first century, the very one that Sister Mary ... read full excerpt from The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History ebook
