The Shroud of Turin is on display (but if you are thinking of going be patient; there are long queues). This object provokes endless fascination: first recorded in 1355 nearly lost to fire in tile 16th century and again very recently its haunting image only revealed on photographic negative plates in 1898. carbon-test dated in 1978 to between 1250 and 1390 (but was the test right?) whereas the weave and plant pollens found on the cloth suggest something contemporary with Jesus the body image too big for a Galilaean man of 2000 years ago and laid out in a way which would not then have been used. It is a sea of contradictions. If true it is not realistic; if false then how was it done and whose is the image which photography has revealed?

To Cardinal Saldarini of Turin these are secondary preoccupations. "It is wrong to talk of a relic in connection with the shroud; it is an icon focussing our thoughts on Christ and his passion" he says. And a member of the house of Savoy owners of the shroud from 1464 to 1983 adds: "This isn't an image; it's a presence".

It is an icon ... Now there is a fashionable word. Until recently we in the West knew little of icons. They were part of the religious tradition of the East. exotic remote 'antiquated' in the view of many. The only icon in that sense which has ever really impinged on us Latin Christians has been that of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (which Easterns consider a rather debased example).

But the word has a wider use; it has become positively trendy. Lady "Di" as described as an "icon"; Munch's painting "The Scream" has been called an "icon" of the 20th century, a century at the end of its tether. Here "icon" seems to mean "something expressing a wider reality and containing that reality within itself'.