A liquid history Blood and animation in late medieval art

In 1276 Giles of Rome compared sperm’s effect on menstrual blood to the work of an artist carving idols from wood.2 His modification of a famous argument by Plato, later taken up by Aristotle, is highly original and points to an important junction of theories about human procreation and theories of artistic creation. Aristotle drew analogies between divine, natural, and artisanal creation with the effect of making their apparent differences even more explicit. The Greek philosopher distinguished between God’s idea of a bed and a “real” bed given form by a carpenter, that is, made by instruments (organa), recalling a divine idea. He uses this analogy in another text, On the Generation of Animals, to explain what sperm is. A. P. Bos summarizes his position thus: