Short answer: "came from a sculpture" is a real, credible hypothesis with a properly peer-reviewed study behind it but it's not established, and the specific claim is narrower and more interesting than "a statue."
The study people are referring to is Ccero Moraes, "Image Formation on the Holy ShroudA Digital 3D Approach," published in
Archaeometry (Wiley, 2025/26). Worth flagging up front that this is the opposite situation from the radiation paper we just went through:
Archaeometry is a legitimate, indexed, peer-reviewed archaeological-science journal, so this one actually clears the bar the McAvoy paper didn't.
The argument hinges on a geometry problem that's been known about the Shroud for over a century.
When you drape a flat cloth over a full 3D body and then flatten it back out, the image you get is noticeably widened and distorted the so-called "Agamemnon Mask effect," named for the Mycenaean gold funerary mask that looked like it had been rolled flat after being fit to a face. The Shroud image doesn't show that wraparound distortion; it reads more like a flat, head-on projection. Moraes ran digital simulations draping virtual fabric over two forms and found that the full 3D human figure produced a widened, distorted imprint, while a low-relief model produced something much more consistent with the Shroud's actual proportions. So his conclusion is specifically a
bas-relief a shallow, slightly raised carving not a full statue, and he leans toward an artist working in painting or low-relief while still acknowledging a remote possibility of a real-body imprint. That fits neatly with the medieval picture: low-relief was a common medieval technique, and the dating and first appearance both land in 14th-century France.
Phys.org + 2Now the honest caveats, because this isn't a closed case:
It's a digital simulation, not a physical experiment Moraes is a 3D/forensic-reconstruction artist using open-source modeling tools (Blender, MakeHuman, CloudCompare) on photographs, not draping real linen over a real carving. The result shows the Shroud's geometry is
more compatible with a low-relief than a body; it doesn't prove a sculpture was used.
It's a contact-transfer model, and there's a substantive objection to that whole framing. The Turin sindonology center pushed back by pointing out that since Vignon and Delage in 1902, the image has been characterized as an orthogonal (vertical) projection rather than something formed by direct enveloping contact and if that's right, it argues against contact transfer from
either a body
or a bas-relief. (That center is an authenticity advocate, so weigh the source, but the orthogonal-projection point is a genuine technical one, not just apologetics.)
FSSPX NewsAnd it only addresses geometry, not chemistry. Moraes explains the image's
proportions, not the physical nature of the image the superficial, pigment-free discoloration of the fibers. Those are separate puzzles, and a sculpture hypothesis has to be paired with a separate account of how the marks were actually deposited (medieval reproduction attempts, like Garlaschelli's in 2009, used a bas-relief plus a rubbing/scorch technique to address exactly that).
So where it nets out: the no-wraparound-distortion observation is actually one of the stronger geometric arguments on the man-made side, and Moraes gave it a clean modern demonstration. But "the Shroud came from a sculpture" is best stated as "the image's proportions are more consistent with a shallow relief than a real body" a well-supported hypothesis, not a settled finding, and one that still leaves the image's chemistry as an open question.
