There are so many fascinating details concerning the Shroud. One of the most interesting to me, is that the image on the Shroud had no flattening of the backside. IOW, the body was not touching the bottom side of the Shroud when the image was created.
This explains why it didn't attract much attention around the world until the end of the 19th century. The reason for this was that it did not seem to be all that spectacular -- just an ancient piece of fabric with what appeared to be the image of a man on it. What changed all of this was the advent of photography. An Italian photographer received permission to photograph the Shroud during one of its rare public displays somehwere around the 1880s, and while he was developing the film he produced a negative that had far more detail than the original image. He thought he had done something wrong in the film development process, but quickly figured out that the negative he had developed in tis process was actually a real "photo."