The Holy Shroud of Besançon

Jean De Loisy · 1634

Medium

Engraving in black and yellowish brown, with hand additions in red gouache on cream, silk satin weave, folded

Original size

Image: 27.5 × 41.8 cm (10 7/8 × 16 1/2 in.); Plate: 27.4 × 41.7 cm (10 13/16 × 16 7/16 in.); Sheet, folded: 31 × 44.2 cm (12 1/4 × 17 7/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

*The Holy Shroud of Besançon* is a remarkable survival — a devotional image that bridges the worlds of printmaking and sacred textile, preserving the memory of one of early modern France's most venerated relics. Jean De Loisy was a Besançon-based engraver working in the seventeenth century, a period when the city's cathedral drew pilgrims from across Europe to venerate its celebrated shroud. What makes this work distinctive is its hybrid nature: the engraved lines in black and yellowish brown are overlaid with hand-applied red gouache on cream silk satin, giving it the intimacy of a painted object rather than a purely printed one. The choice of silk satin as a support was deliberate — it echoed the textile nature of the relic itself, collapsing the distance between image and object. The Shroud of Besançon, long believed to be a companion relic to the Shroud of Turin, was destroyed during the French Revolution in 1794, making images like De Loisy's among the primary visual records of how it appeared and was displayed. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates this layered, meditative work into a format that honours its devotional weight — capturing the fine tonal gradations of the engraving and the warm accents that give the original its quiet intensity.