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As my undergraduate degree was in history, I'm very cognizant of the value of original documents. Bearing in mind that it could have been a turf war, since the shroud was in the hands of a layman, I still don't think we can just ignore contemporary accounts. Especially since Bishop de Poitier said he knew who the artist was, and that the artist had acknowledged to him that he created the shroud.

I can certainly appreciate the value of original documents. Now that it has been established that the shroud is not a painted image, that would dispel the accounts in those documents. It would have taken a scientific genius to also match up the blood stains with another cloth to be discovered at a later date. Moreover, the 'artist' would also have to be familiar with botany. The combination of pollen spores lodged in the Shroud’s surface, as well as floral images mysteriously “imprinted” on the face of the cloth, have been determined as only coming from plants growing in a restricted area around Jerusalem.

The botany is easily disposed of, since the cloth itself could have come (and pretty clearly did) from Palestine. Seems possible that somebody might decide to "enhance" an actual relic by "improving" it.

The negative image has apparently been duplicated by an Italian chemist using non-painting methods. So just the fact that the shroud isn't painted (pigments applied to the surface as opposed to soaked in) doesn't "dispel" the original documents.

I keep saying that moderns have this odd tendency to believe that our medieval ancestors were all benighted yahoos and knew nothing about science or technology. Leonardo alone ought to dispel that idea, but there were plenty of others too.

As for the matching bloodstains, since the shroud and photographic images of it have been around for years now, it wouldn't take a genius to match up the photographs with a not "later-discovered" but "later-created" sudarium.

Bit of devil's advocacy here, but this is by no means settled and there's no point in assuming that it is.