Baby Jesus and the Homunculus

We’ve all marveled at the grotesque, oddly-proportioned old man babies in medieval art -- but why did artists of the period pain such creatures? In this special Christmas episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the convergence of the homunculus theory of human reproduction, the nativity and the infants of medieval and renaissance art.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, I'm here to see the baby. Oh you mean
the child whose birth was foretold in the stars. Uh, well, yeah,
there is this an angel that told me to come.
An angel. Yeah, a big winged fella made out of
fire and light and all these like spinning wheels and stuff.
Oh of course, yes, Well step right this way. Just

(00:24):
we should warn you be prepared. Oh, no, worries. I've
been around babies before, I got two of my own.
I'll keep quiet. No, no, no, you don't understand. This
is a special infant. It looks different. Oh ugly baby.
Don't worry. I got it. I know how to respond,
what to say, what not to say. I don't think
you do, know, my friend, this baby is unlike anything

(00:46):
I've seen before in my travels in the far East
to the far West. It is unusual. Well, now I
really want to see this baby. Let's do this. Well,
you should take a moment to prepare. So Jesus, yes
that is his name. He looks like a tiny old man,
and not in the way that he's supposed to look

(01:08):
like a tiny old man. He looks like a miniature
old man with are those abs? Yes they are, And
we're all a bit confused about the blonde hair like
I'm only now noticing that there's a disc of cosmic
radiance surrounding his head because I'm distracted by the fact
that he looks like a miniature old man with with muscles. Strange,

(01:29):
isn't it. Oh, he's looking this way. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,

(01:49):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Hey, it being
right around the Christmas season for for these Christmas celebrating
cultures all over the place, that we should ask you
to do a little thought experiment going through the history
of of art in depiction of the Christian Nativity scene.
And maybe Jesus, imagine you're one of those shepherds or

(02:12):
wise men or farm animals or other assembled masses on
the premises in the Nativity scene. So you're there in
the barn and the major and there's the baby. But
the baby doesn't quite look right, indeed, and it doesn't
look right in a way that is is quite unsettling.
It looks like a like a tiny adult. Yeah, Mary

(02:36):
is there. Joseph's looking on Sometimes depending on the painting,
and she's got the baby in her arms or on
her lap, or or in the manger. But no matter what,
the baby kind of looks like Alan Arkin. Yeah, the
christ Child often does in some of these these paintings
that we're gonna be discussing here today, or Philip Seymour Hoffman,

(02:57):
a little bit of Philip sy Moore Hoffman. Sometimes they
catch a little bit of Vladimir Putin in there. You've
got a baby putin sometimes, or sometimes the christ Child
looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, yeah, this, uh, this is
the case if if you look at a lot of
medieval art and even early Renaissance art, you'll see these
depictions of the Christ Child that are a little jarring,

(03:19):
especially if you're used to more modern interpretations of a
baby in a manger, and and that includes like actual
live Nativity scenes where you have an actual infant standing
in for the christ Child. This is something that I
imagine a number of our listeners out there have picked
up on of late, because there are these articles, these

(03:40):
sort of galleries that make the rounds on social media,
often with titles like ugly Renaissance Babies or Renaissance um
babies and Renaissance paintings that can't even I think that
was a title of one that gave me a chuckle
a while back. Roll will just be this very yeah,
very buzzfeedy, very clicky, and it'll be this just barrage

(04:00):
of indeed strange looking babies. Now, babies are strange looking anyway,
but on top of that, you do have all of
these like odd poses, these odd facial expressions, the odd
just morphology of the christ child, sometimes involving like what
appears to be male pattern baldness, or muscles like adults,

(04:24):
muscles like something out of a statue of Apollo, and
it's it's a little confusing, especially considering that's you know,
sometimes these are in older medieval works where there's a
certain abstraction to the to just how that the human
form itself is displayed. But other times it's clearly a

(04:44):
work of of high craftsmanship, of high artistry. And yet
the baby the center of the picture, that really the
most important figure in in Christian traditions. There's something off
about it, and if really begin to think about it
and try to tease it apart, it's it's initially difficult
to figure out why why would this one thing be

(05:06):
so off? Yeah, So we wanted to talk today about
the artistic traditions of depicting the Christ Child, specifically the
baby in the manger, but also babies in general throughout
medieval art and Renaissance art. Anybody who would be having
occasion to draw the Nativity or to draw the Virgin

(05:26):
Mary and the in the Christ Child in her arms. Uh,
And why so often you get a little odd aliens
with wide eyes gazing up to the mother ship, or
why you get creepy old men with like long slender limbs,
or babies that seem to be maybe growing a five
o'clock shadow. Some of these even remind me of the

(05:47):
Island of Dr Moreau, the version with Marlon Brando. Um,
if you recall, he had what would later become known
as a mini me, and some of the Christ Child
that you encounter in uh, in medieval art have that
kind of appearance. Yeah. And so what we're picking up
on is our instinctual ideas about what babies are supposed

(06:08):
to look like. And we we've talked about this in
recent episodes. Actually, we talked about it in our Cuteness
and Monstrosity episode back in October um. But yeah, there
are these basic features that you see as the most
common morphology is associated with babies. And it's been hypothesized
that certain types of features sort of set off our
cuteness detectors, that like, we see a creature of a

(06:31):
certain kind of shape and it makes us go, ah,
I want to take care of that thing. And so
some of these commonly understood shapes would be like a
large head and like a large forehead, or what's known
as the predominance of the brain capsule, large low lying eyes,
so the eyes are sort of low set on the

(06:51):
face and their big bulging cheeks, short, thick, kind of
stubby arms and legs, a springy or elastic consistency. So
something that looks kind of soft and maybe not covered
in really hard muscles and clumsy movements is the final one.
I guess that would come through more in in real

(07:12):
life movement, though you can sometimes communicate grace or clumsiness
in poses, and a lot of these Baby Jesus Is
in these paintings do appear very graceful in their movements. Yeah,
you see the sort of a regal demeanor. Sometimes they're
brandishing a scepter or or a parrot. Uh. And then
on top of that, many of these features that we've

(07:32):
already touched on, they look like miniature adult humans in
their proportioned that way, slender arms and legs, or the
the baby has appeared appears to have what it may
be male pattern baldness, painfully thin or overly muscular, and
like some of these are seriously muscularity. Oh yeah, like
like power lifter muscular. You look at them, and you you,

(07:54):
you may immediately ask did they ever see a baby?
Did they know what a baby looked like? You mean
the artist? Did they just say? Well, I guess it
was like a smaller version of Michael Angelo's David. That's
clearly what an infant would consist of. So what was
causing all of these painters and sculptors and people to
represent babies in a way that so thoroughly violates our

(08:17):
instinctual categories of what babies look like and how they're shaped.
Well that is the discussion for today, and it's really
it's really I think it's a surprisingly broad discussion because
it's we're gonna end up drawing in not only art
history and medieval history, but also a fair amount of
Christian theology, uh scientific attempts to understand what's happening with

(08:40):
human reproduction. It's one of these excellent topics where you
have just this convergence of several different disciplines and hopefully
that in the end this is going to be an
episode that alchemist and biologist alike can get into. Christians
and non Christians, art historians and precious moments figuring collectors.
You're all going to be uh united in this exploration

(09:02):
of weird baby Jesus is in art? All right, well,
I think maybe we should take a quick break and
when we come back we will explore this question further.
Thank alright, we're back. So before we go in any further,
let's just talk about the time frame here. We are
largely talking about a popular style within medieval European artistic

(09:23):
traditions that give way to more realistic depictions of children
and the Christ child during the Renaissance, but not always
perfectly realistic. So I would say, you can correct me
if you disagree, but the main thing we see is
in the medieval period you're going to have babies and
baby Jesus is that don't look anything like babies look

(09:46):
like creepy old men or look like aliens, and then
going into the Renaissance, you're going to get things that
start to look a little bit more realistic and less
like strange aliens and creepy old men, but more just
sort of like super muscular nude babies. Yeah, it's a
it's a gradual process, this uh, this transformation that takes

(10:08):
hold over over the Christ Child in art, and it's
not gonna happen. There's not like a firm timeline across
all areas and all artists. It is. It is a
shift in artistic traditions, and therefore it's not going to happen. Um,
you know, like clockwork. But speaking of clockwork, just to
assign rough boundaries to these time periods, the Middle Ages
are generally said to stretch from the fifth century to

(10:29):
the fifteenth century, from the fall of the Western Roman
Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance. And the Renaissance
begins in Florence, Italy in the fourteenth century and kind
of extends out from there. But as phil Edwards put
it in a Vox article that he wrote, well, why
babies and medieval paintings look like ugly old men? He
says that there there are holes in the Renaissance. Uh,

(10:53):
And I think this jives with our modern experience of
creative trends, right, Like, the Renaissance is not gonna pick
up everywhere at once. Uh, It's going to pick up
in certain areas, certain places that are perhaps more progressive,
and then it's going to steadily leak into these other
portions of Europe. Well, things don't pick up everywhere at
once now on Earth, and we have the Internet. I mean,

(11:15):
they didn't have anything like the Internet. And then so
if you're if you're talking about expansion of learning and
techniques and artistic styles changing, yeah, it's gonna take hundreds
of years. Yeah. For instance, we have electronic music now
and we've had it for decades, and yet I'm still
hearing classical scores from motion pictures. It's disgusting. What's up
with that? So you just want to Windy Carlos everything

(11:36):
into the future, Tangerine Dream, Windy Carlos Um. Uh, that
that's what I want in all of my films. Anything
less is disappointing. Okay, So we're gonna look at a
few examples of paintings. Well, it's it's gonna be hard
to look at them during the podcast, I guess, But
I'm gonna create an accompanying page It's Stuff to Blow
your Mind dot Com that includes many of the paintings

(11:57):
were discussing here today. Okay, so can get an idea
about what we're talking about here? Well, should we at
least try to describe a couple of them? Sure, let's
do it. So the first one we're gonna talk about
is from twelve thirty, so this is thoroughly medieval period
before before the Renaissance. Yeah. And the artist is one
barone barreling here, and it's titled Madonna and Child, and

(12:20):
it is a picture of the Madonna, the Virgin Mary,
and the Christ Child. I'd say they both look like aliens.
They have extremely extremely elongated faces with a very very
long noses, um like not noses as it not long
as in poking out from the face, but extending way
way down along the length of the face. Yeah. It has, uh,

(12:45):
it has what you would probably call like Byzantine aesthetics
to it. And the child, I thought the child kind
of looks like Peter Capaldi or perhaps Harold Ramos. I
sort of see a an art Garfunkle from Metal Luna.
You know the planet Exeter is from in this island Earth?
And why is he holding a stick of dynamite? Is
that a scepter or a skirt supposed to be accepter?
The child does have a very regal air to them.

(13:07):
This is this is a child that is probably going
a Christ child that is going to speak to you
as an adult, or at least that's what you get
from this this particular image and send you instructions for
an interocitory. Now the next image, I'm still trying to
track down the the actual time and artist on, but
I'll try and include it on the page and then
you can refer back to it. But in this one,

(13:28):
we see another sort of alien looking Serene Mary, this
time with this kind of halo behind her head, and
she is holding a christ child but also has a
halo around his head. Mary looks like the alien for
Mac and me, and the baby just is straight up.
David Gergan, can you can you describe who David Gergen is?

(13:51):
David Gergan, He's an American political consultant. I think he
worked for Nixon and for Bill Clinton maybe, but yeah,
he's just gotta he got a kind of distinctive face,
and the baby looks like him. Yes, a very mature
face to say the least. Now, the next image we're
gonna discuss. This is the one that really captured me
the most for a number of reasons. It's a work

(14:13):
by the Dutch master Martin van Himskrek, and this guy
live through fift seventy four. So this is this is
the This is very much an early Renaissance guy here
with with with clear early Renaissance artistic skills like it
is a beautiful painting titled St. St. Luke Painting the Virgin.

(14:35):
It is a depiction of of a sort of a
legendary tale that takes hold in his in his repeated
numerous times and artistic traditions, in which the wine which Luke,
the biblical Luke paints picked a painting of Mary and
the Christ Child. Is this supposed to be the author
of the Gospel of Luke. Yes. One thing you will

(14:57):
immediately notice once you start getting into the Renaissance period
paintings is that they look not exactly realistic, but much
much more realistic than the medieval paintings. Robert I was
making this comparison earlier and I wonder what you've been
thinking about it. When I see medieval European artwork, I
often think of it as being somewhat similar to modern

(15:20):
political cartoons, and that there's really no effort to achieve
realism of any kind. You're not trying to render a
photo realistic person or get the details and proportions of
the human body right. People have sort of exaggerated features
that almost look as if they are designed to indicate
certain symbolic things about the people. And that I get

(15:43):
that feeling, because like in political cartoons, people aren't really
meant to literally embody people, but usually embody a concept.
So like in a political cartoon, you'd have like a
guy in a suit with like a you know, like
a big crazy looking face, and he's he's just got
a label on him that says like taxes, And medieval

(16:03):
artwork seems a lot like that to me, Like a
character depicted often seems to embody a virtue or embody
a sin, or embody some other kind of abstract idea. Yeah.
I thought about this a lot when we were reading
this is it relates to monstrosity because we see so
many wonderful monstrosities in medieval artistic traditions, and sometimes they

(16:24):
involve Christ as well. There's this I was showing you
a few of these images before we went in here.
But you have these occasional depictions either of Christ with
three faces or three heads, or depictions of the Holy Trinity,
the idea that you have God uh and Jesus and
the Holy Spirit always one united thing. You have it

(16:45):
displayed as a three headed sort of a three headed
Angel or a three headed Christ. And if you look
at this, certainly from her modern perspective, it seems a
little weird. It seems potentially blasphemous. Uh. And yet and
yet you have to put yourself in the mind of
someone trying to convey a complex theological um h model

(17:08):
to someone using only visuals. How would you do that?
Why you just draw Christ with three faces? Yeah, I
think that's a good point. There's like another way in
which we see that. Apparently realism did not seem to
be a highly prized aspect of of representation of people
in medieval artworks, in medieval European artworks, which brings us

(17:28):
back to this this painting by Martin von Helmskirk, which
is highly detailed. It is a. It is a beautiful image.
You're gonna have to definitely look at this on the
page that I build. But at the same time, if
we we're gonna compare it to two other things like
what this makes me think about and images like this
makes me think about our scenes and movies that are

(17:51):
so well shot, so like insanely shot that it throws
you out of the viewing experience. Um, maybe it will
be some experimental director or some sort of shot where
they had to digitally remove the you know, the camera
or the set to make it work, where you're just
thrown out of the movie because you're thinking, Wow, how
did they shoot this? This is just a technical marvel?

(18:12):
And then you don't you're not even paying attention to
what the characters are doing. Yeah, you can think about
that in multiple directions. I don't love movies with a
lot of c g I action in them because I
I stop, it stops feeling real to me. But you
can go in the other direction. You don't even have
to use a lot of c g I. You might
think about like Terrence Malick films or something where uh,
there's just gonna be a whole lot of extremely beautiful

(18:33):
kind of perfect photography in them, and that can sometimes
tend to take you out of the narrative because you
just sort of like zone out looking at it and
then sometimes thinking critically about it, like wow that you
know what, what were the what were they doing with
this shot? I have the same experience with with super
long shots in a film, like there seems to be

(18:55):
a cut off where where a long shot ceases to
be just like a seamless experience of the movie, and
you start freaking out and realize, oh, my goodness, we're
still in the same shot. How did they do this?
Stop it, stop shooting shooting, because you're just this is
must be costing a fortune. Now this vent hymskirk painting here.
It is beautiful and it does seem realistic in a

(19:17):
lot of ways, but the baby Jesus in it is
messed up. He is a beefy grimlin power lifter, and
not just so. He's super ripped with muscles all over
and has adult human man proportions. Does not have that
you know, large baby head and stubby legs. He's got
ripped muscle the arms and legs, and he's also doing

(19:41):
this pose that's like this Donkey Kong pose, you know,
where he's like stomping with one leg up and down.
He looks like he is like in a roid rage
against Mary. And it's it's notable too that there is
an angel standing in the background lighting the painting, like
a winged humanoid. And we're not even talking about that.

(20:01):
We're talking about the baby as being the most unrealistic
portion of of the of the painting. But to come
back to the theme in a different way than the
medieval artwork, this just seems like if somebody painted this now,
it would come off as a deliberate act of blasphemy,
you know, it would look like somebody was trying to
make fun of the baby Jesus in some way. But no,

(20:23):
I mean this, this appears to be genuinely reverent artwork. Uh.
And so why why would they do that with all
the muscles? I mean, it's especially noteworthy in the work
of Holm's correct because you see some other paintings that
he did. He did a subsequent painting of of St.
Luke painting the Virgin Mary and the Baby, and it's

(20:44):
it's notable for a number of reasons. For starters, the
baby is less ridiculous, but also still fairly muscular and
has a parent on one hand. Also, you see in
the in the foreground there is a book that is
apparently has to be uh a notable anatomy textbook. In

(21:04):
the background there is somebody dissecting the corpse so that
they can better create sculptures of the human body. So
the painting itself is kind of about the insane level
of detail that goes into depicting the human form and paintings,
and about how you rely upon the work of Galen
and and uh another anatomous how you're you're looking at

(21:27):
the classical sculpture as the model and the ideal human form,
and yet the child is still this thing that is
in a state of flux that is somehow outside of
this new artistic tradition. Yeah, the child doesn't look as
as crazy as he did in the other painting, but
he's still got monstrously muscled legs. It looks like he

(21:50):
he reminds me his legs look like those um uh,
those Belgian blue cattle, you know, the ones where they
have all that like the double muscles that they've been
bred for. And it looks like somebody stuffed a bunch
of bean bags under their skin. Yeah, I think I
think that's apt. It's still a very very muscular baby.
And and the thing is, you can look at other

(22:10):
paintings that that him's correct did. For instance, he did
a fifteen thirty two painting of a family, a family portrait,
and it's just you know, a mom and dad, uh,
two young children and then an infant and the infant. Yeah,
it's still a little on the muscular side. But but
would not instantly throw you off. If you just solve

(22:31):
this on a on a wall in a museum, you
wouldn't freak out and say, ah, muscle baby, what's going on?
You would just say, oh, well, there's another portrait of
a family. Looks a little bit like Louie Anderson. But okay, yeah,
but but in in the appropriate way that all babies
should look kind of like Louie Anderson. Yeah, alright, so
let's start taking this apart and figuring out what's going
on here. So for starters, this obviously wasn't simply a

(22:55):
case of artists didn't learn how to draw babies till later. Right,
People all over the world, in different cult urs have
learned different ways of representing the human body throughout history.
And there have been methods before the medieval European art
traditions that were much more photo realistic. Yeah, so you know,
we have to think about style, the artistic intention, but

(23:15):
also about the subject matter itself. Uh. So we have
to ground artistic depictions of infants within the framework of
the time. How did denizens of the Middle Age ages
view babies? Well, that's a good question, and it turns
out that is something that has undergone a decent amount
of controversy over the years. Yeah, for starters, I mentioned

(23:36):
that Vox article earlier by Phil Edwards, and in it
he speaks with Matthew Averett, an art history professor at
Crichton University and editor of the anthology The Early Modern
Child in Art and History, and uh He points out
that medieval paintings were typically commissioned by churches, which meant
that any painting of a baby was most likely going
to be the baby Jesus, with some prominent except is

(24:00):
here and there, like it might be Moses or John
the Baptists, But generally you're if you're painting a baby
during this time, you're probably painting the Christ child. So
when you see babies in medieval European artwork. You're probably
not getting so much a sense of what they thought
of babies, but what they thought of the baby Jesus
in particular, right, which is a much more We'll get
more into the theology of this question later, but but yeah,

(24:22):
this is instantly more complicated than just hescy that that
drooling infant over there, draw that infant as it looks now. Now,
we did mention the idea that medieval artists were less
interested in realistic depictions than artists of many other times
and places, right, right, Yeah, it's only later that it's
particularly the Renaissance, that people became interested in naturalism and

(24:43):
idealized forms, and looking back to these classical statues as
a model. Evereite sort of refers to medieval artwork as
a kind of expressionism, right. It doesn't usually get put
that way in the literature, but thinks about it as
the forms are expressing ideas and feelings more than they
are like physical morphology. So it's less it's less about

(25:05):
what did Christ look like as a baby, and more
like how should how should I feel about the Christ child?
How should I feel about the birth of Christ? In
this story? Now, up to this point, if that's all,
you know, you still might be a little bit confused,
because you'd be like, Okay, so why am I seeing
a little Alan Arkin with muscles or something. We'll get

(25:26):
back to that in a minute. So I followed up
and went to this book that was edited by Matthew Everitt,
the called The Early Modern Child in Art and History,
published by Rutledge in and Everitt wrote the intro chapter
on this book, and I thought, hey, he had some
interesting things to say about the artistic traditions of representing
children and babies. His intro chapter focuses a lot on

(25:47):
updating and critiquing this foundational work in the field of
of medieval ideas about children and artistic representations of children.
And that was a nineteen sixty book about children and
his Stree by the historian Philippe Aries. Now, Renaissance Europe
was a place and a time at which children were
a huge portion of the population. It's been estimated that

(26:10):
in Italian cities during the Renaissance, up to half of
the population was under fifteen years old. I mean, think
about that. But Aries believed that in the Middle Ages
in Europe, childhood did not really exist as a concept.
So for Aries. His idea was that in medieval thought,

(26:31):
childhood did not exist as a meaningful stage of life,
but was basically a mere transition period which was quickly
passed through and then forgotten. So for Aries, before the
age of seven children were considered sort of miniature adults,
and then after the age of seven they were simply adults,
because at about the age of seven they would assume

(26:52):
adult roles in terms of labor and production. He also
believed this was due to high mortality of infants and
children in medieval Europe. Apparently they were just incredibly high
rates of exposure and abandonment of babies at the time,
and in summarizing areas work, Favorite writes that quote, children
appeared in medieval art, but as with the homunculous images

(27:14):
of Jesus, and we'll get to more about that in
a bit, children were portrayed as miniature adults because artists
and audiences had no conception of childhood and therefore would
not have been able to understand a child like Jesus. Now.
According to Arias, this began to change in the Renaissance,
when parents began to value childhood and childhood education as

(27:36):
distinct from adult education. A lot of this had to
do with changes in families, increases in marriages based on love,
and the idea that you would you would nurture a
child and treat them specifically as a child, and how
you instructed them. Yeah. Just really this more modern concept
that the childhood is this bubble that should be protected

(27:57):
and maintained. You know that the world that present to
your child is maybe, you know, maybe not completely at
odds with reality, but there are going to be certain
elements of reality that are that are more finely edited
than others. Yeah. Now there might be some grains of
truth in what are he says, But beginning in about
the nineteen eighties, scholars began to seriously diverge from Aria's

(28:19):
view of childhood is essentially non existent or meaningless in
medieval European thought. Everitt disagrees with it too. He though
there are a lot of ways in which medieval and
early modern depictions of children and babies are substantially different
from one another. Uh and from modern depictions. Of course,
a lot of this had to do with the purpose
of the art and what it was used for. Just

(28:40):
one example, Averite says that strangely adult looking children in
some early modern paintings might be indicative of the fact
that sometimes these paintings were considered for children, sort of
showing them good examples. Quote. Parents and Renaissance Italy were
encouraged to have images of saintly children are and in

(29:00):
virgins because they set positive examples for children. So by analogy,
you might look at some of these musclely adult shaped
children and babies that might have been for the benefit
of young kids who would look at them and say,
I want to be that muscle baby. And likewise you
could see this being an expression of what the adults
want the child to be. I want you to be

(29:22):
this strong, regal and uh and and resilient individual. Yeah.
But then also it's informed by theological concepts, remembering that
a lot of these pictures of babies were supposed to
be the baby Jesus. That might have been depicted just
differently than other babies would be. And you got to
think about, like, um, who art was generally made for

(29:43):
in both the medieval and the Renaissance periods. Yeah, you
didn't see much in the way of art, especially uh.
Portraiture for the common people are certainly for the poor.
These were images for the wealthy ruling classes that were
These were pieces of art for the church and and
again often displayed biblical scenes or scenes of of of

(30:05):
importance within Christian tradition. And then everyone was working within
these artistic conventions. Like you can imagine yourself as an
artist at this time. The church comes to you, they
have a specific request, they want a particular biblical scene
recreated as a painting or some other medium, and then
you have to follow through on it. And they're like
any client, they have certain uh ideas in mind, they

(30:29):
have certain existing works in mind, so you're kind of forced,
probably shoehorn into creating something within that artistic tradition. There's
not really a lot of room to try exciting new things.
And and again you have to represent these various theological
ideas as well, or you're you're having to pick up
on existing connections that are made in the literature. For example,

(30:50):
I was I was reading from this book by Mary
Design titled The Quest for the Christ Child in the
Later Middle Ages, and she points out that you'll often
encounter these encounter these squaddle babies in medieval art that
look very similar to dead infants that are wrapped up
in grave shrouds, and this, she says, helps us appreciate
why Christ frequently appears in nativity scenes tightly swaddled and

(31:13):
lying on a quote block like almost tomblike manger. And
I'll include an example of this on the the accompanying
page for this episode, because there's a wonderful piece from
around the fourteen fifty four, a German painting that displays
this really dead looking Christ child just wrapped up like

(31:35):
a money with this very vacant but believably infantile head. Yeah,
it does have the baby proportions right, like, it's got
the it's got the chubby cheeks, and it's got the
low set eyes. But it also looks miserable and somewhat lifeless. Yeah,
this is a piece by Andrea Mantania. And indeed you

(31:56):
look at this and you say, oh, that poor baby,
that poor Christ child. He looks a bit out of it.
He looks miserable, and and part of this is because
you had it was it was common in the in
the artistic traditions and in the literary traditions to make
this connection between the death of Christ, between between Christ
as a corpse in the tomb. Prior to resurrection and

(32:18):
the initial birth of the Christ Child. It's almost like
the person of Christ in these medieval artworks is not
to be represented as Jesus would have been in that
scene in his life. What is sort of like loaded
with all the significance of every story about him all
at once. Yeah, and this comes back to the again,
to that medieval idea, especially that that a painting is

(32:41):
not just an illustration, it is conveying some very important
data about the subject, It is conveying theology to the viewer. Now, Dison,
she argues that just as God was a mystery to
medieval people, so too was the child. She touches on
a lot of these discussions that we've alluded already. She

(33:01):
points out that medieval historian David Herlihy argued that the
emergence of a new urban economy in the later Middle
Ages led to greater awareness and concern for children. Not
only this, but we came to idolize them as a
coping mechanism for the stress of day to day life.
So when times got tough, you thought like, oh, well,
how great it is to be a child at play

(33:22):
despite all the plague. And on top of this, though
There's another another thing going on here, and that's that
lay in religious people of the day all came to
admire the childlike aspects of the Christ child. So it's
not just uh, you know, the theological dimensions that are
important here to the Christ, but but but just the

(33:43):
idea that there's an innocence to the figure as well.
So Design points out that some medieval commentators noted the
childlike virtues of Jesus, and then you had the Cistercians
and the Franciscans both promoting devotion to the child Jesus,
though both aimed for a more more complex understanding of Christ,
with sentimental childlike qualities kind of emerging as a byproduct.

(34:07):
So you have certainly had this older tradition where the
Christ child is depicted as an all knowing, all powerful
super baby. But then this new approach is uh is
leaning more into a realistically sentimental depiction of a young Jesus. Still,
Design stresses that there there are many categories for late
medieval depictions of the baby Jesus, and it's kind of

(34:32):
it would be disingenuous to say that you just had
two types of of infants. You didn't have just ugly
babies and realistic babies, or just super babies and real babies.
I think it's interesting to note all of the like, uh,
the sort of fractious theological potential in the idea of
the Christ Child here, because the idea of the infant

(34:53):
Christ gives rise to these contradictions where whether you believe
in him as like an all knowing, all powerful super
baby or a normal baby, either one. I could see
people adhering to either one of those positions and finding
the other one blasphemous. Yeah, I mean, it's it's easy
to take take this for granted, I guess growing up
and within Christian traditions and just being bombarded with images

(35:16):
of the Christ Child. But just imagine, like all the
potential questions you have, like, Okay, this is the this
is the Son of God, this is God incarnate come
to earth to redeem humanity. So what is it like
as a baby? Is it is it smart and man
like and its behavior or is it pooping itself? Is

(35:36):
it is it puking? Is it doing all of these, um,
you know, at times of disturbing and gross things that
an actual larvel humanoid would do. I'm sure. I mean,
this has been subject to theological debate. Yeah, but once
we're we're into the Renaissance. Here we have the middle
class growing in power and wealth, and there's an increased
demand for portraits. Plus there's an increased emphasis on courting

(36:00):
the world as it is rather than the expressionism of
the past. I think one of the great examples of this,
when we've discussed on the show before, is Peter Brugal
the Elder, the sixteenth century Flemish artist whose paintings just
positively boil with depictions of contemporary and peasant life, even
in religious works. So busy. Yeah, but you can you
can look at them and it gives you some insight

(36:21):
into what what was actually going on in the broader
world and the world outside of the church, and it's
books and it's uh, it's artistic traditions. Now, I want
to have throw in one more note about nudity here
that I think is revealing, uh, the nudity of the
Christ child, because if you look at a lot of
these images of late medieval and Renaissance baby Jesus Is,

(36:43):
you'll often find that the baby is naked, and sometimes
the baby is like extremely naked with just like exposed
genitalia to the point where it seems like a lot
of there was a lot of intent on making the
child as naked as possible, and indeed it does become
common in Renaissance art to see the infant Jesus depicted
nude with visible genitalia. The late art historian Leo Steinberg

(37:08):
theorized that it had to do with ongoing theological debates
about the humanity or the transcendent divinity of Jesus. So
the nudity of the child and perhaps it's more realistic
depiction in general in general, is presented as proof of
his humanity. So this is yet again an answer to
a theological question. The idea is like, you know, was

(37:28):
Jesus fully human or was he some sort of spirit being?
And so they want to put their foot down and say, like, no,
he had a human body. Yeah, yeah, I mean Jesus
Christ is largely held in Christian traditions as God incarnate
and therefore the product of a immortal woman, no matter
how virginal and esteemed, and be the creator of the
universe God, so he is it. The is at the

(37:51):
very least a hybrid entity with attitudes leaning in mortal
or divine directions depending on you know, your particular theology
or in some cases, your particular heresy. So how you know,
you end up asking how do you choose to think
of and portray the newborn Christ as more human or
as more divine, as natural or as preternatural. And this

(38:13):
whole discussion occurs as humans are still working out exactly
what's happening during reproduction itself. Yeah, we didn't even get
into that yet. I mean, how are these infant bodies
formed in the first place? Yeah? Does Mary contribute to
the Christ child's humanity merely by being its vessel? Does
she contribute to his flesh? Is there is there a
resemblance between mother and child here? Uh? So, keep all

(38:36):
of this in mind as we take one more break
and come back to continue to tackle this question and
indeed summon the homunculous. Thank alright, we're back, Robert. Let's
summon the homunculous. Yes, the homunculous. Now, when we when
we talk about homunculi imagine a number of people think

(38:58):
rather understand ndably, of the the alchemical homunculous, the idea
of an artificial, diminutive humanoid that is cooked up. You know,
wizards laboratory, right, So you might have an alchemist like
Paracelsus who says that I can create a chemical human
one that is out, yeah, out of synthetic ingredients, I

(39:19):
will make a human homunculous, a small man. And that's
the funky chemical spelling to the y in it. Here's
a quick quote from Mary Baine Campbell from artificial Men, alchemy,
trans substantiation, and the homunculous quote Mary, even to the
Protestants who worked to reduce for importance in the dramatists,

(39:40):
persona of the divine was and had to be a
partner in this procreation, or Jesus could not be an
incarnate god, half human, half divine. Nonetheless, the trans substantiation
of the sacramental feast of the Eucharist was a process
that became at least potentially susceptible to chemical Again with
the y At explanation. In the intellectual world of the Reformation,

(40:03):
a world that included the increasingly philosophical and spiritualized discipline
of chemistry, the art of transmutation, and an increasingly naturalized theology. Oh,
I've never made that connection before, but that's amazing. So
believing in the transubstantiation of the eucharis, meaning that when
you take communion, the bread physically truly is transformed into

(40:26):
the body of Christ, and that the wine physically truly
is transformed into the Blood of Christ. These are theological dogmas,
but that if you take them literally, you start to
believe that there may be other ways in which substances
can be transformed into living tissue. Right it It introduces
a a magical concept that that you've taken as a

(40:48):
as a literal fact turns a number of different things
on its head. Yeah. Now, like all sexually reproducing species,
humans engage insects to perform sexual recombination. We generally don't
follow the idea of spontaneous generation anymore. We think that
generally life most of the time comes from life, and
so when sexual recombination happens in sexually reproducing species, you

(41:11):
have a random mixing of genes from the mother and
the father. So our our sexual cells are known as
gamme eats, the male sperm and the female egg, and
each of these contained twenty three chromosomes, which is half
the normal number of chromosomes in a cell, and then
they fuse together to form a new zygote with forty
six chromosomes of randomly jumbled genes from the mother and

(41:33):
from the father, and these cells then begin to divide
until they start to take the shape of an embryo
within the mother's uterus. Those are the known basics of
actual sexual reproduction, but it hasn't always been taken for
granted that this is how it happens. And in fact,
I think a great idea for a future episode or
series of episodes would be the question of why sexual recombination?

(41:56):
Why don't we just all do a sexual reproduction and
like bacteria mind or something like that, why don't we
just split in half and make clones of ourselves? In biology,
this question is often framed as what compensates for the
cost of males? But yeah, that's a good question to explore.
We should come back to it in the future. But
but yeah, so to continue, we know that sexual recombination

(42:19):
takes information from the mother and from the father and
fuses it to create a new cell, a new being,
by jumbling together bits of the blueprints that make up
both of the parents. Yeah, and and you know is
is early as three fifty BC. Aristotle proposed a theory
of epigenesis, which was essentially correct. Yeah. This was basically

(42:42):
the idea that the sperm and egg joined to create
undifferentiated cells like stem cells, which then matured over time
into bodies. Maybe not correct in all the details as
he imagined it, but it basically gets the gist of
reproduction right. And yet just a few centuries ago you
had many people who believed in what was known as
pre formation ism, yeah, or pre formation theory. So in

(43:03):
like the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many very learned or
supposedly learned scholars and natural philosophers had this idea that
the embryonic human being was already fully formed in its
in its entirety, except being like smaller or maybe in
a in a smaller or sort of less less defined

(43:26):
shape within the sex cells of the mother or the father.
They were like fully formed versions of themselves which would
simply grow in size or possibly change in shape within
the uterus during pregnancy. Essentially the sex cells were each
a homunculus. Yeah, and you see some wonderful artistic depictions

(43:47):
of this, illustrations of how this might go down. Use
imagine number of this have seen these of a sperm
and there's a tiny human in the sperm. The idea
here is that the male of the species just shoots
a tiny human into the female, and the female is
just where that tiny human grows. Yeah. So one interesting

(44:08):
side note I think I would like to point out
that the transition from preformation theory to modern reproductive theory
is mainly a shift in emphasis about what exactly gets
transmitted during sex and during birth. Under preformation theory, what
gets transmitted is material or the means to make material grow.

(44:28):
You know, it's either you either if you believe that
the sperm cell is a pre fully formed human, it's
being transmitted into the uterus, or if you believe that
the egg is a pre fully formed human. Uh, the
sexual reproduction puts some chemical in place that allows it
to grow. But under modern theory, what gets transmitted is
not material so much as information. It's not getting the

(44:52):
rebels a tiny death star, it's getting them the plans
for the death star. But by focusing on material like this,
preform nation theory leads to a problem. The sperm and
the egg can't both be a homunculus, or in what
in that case, what's the point of the homunculus? So
which one is it here you get the controversy between
the spermists and the Ovists. Yes, now we've touched a

(45:16):
little bit on the spurmose. But but Ovis they believe
that the egg contained all that was needed, and it
mean merely required. Male seed is a kind of chemical trigger. Yeah,
it would be some kind of vapor that would cause
the growth. Yeah, just a sort of a firing of
the starter pistol that says, all right, grow the homunculus. Okay,
now my favorite, uh, the later day Ovist is an

(45:38):
Italian physiologist and priest, Lazarro Spalonzani, who lives through spalon
Zani is great. So he believed, as did Charles Bonnett,
in the Ovist version of preformation theory, and the specifics
of their idea is that God created the first female
specimen of every spece ease, and when he created that

(46:02):
first female, he implanted within her the tiny forms of
all future descendants, fully shaped from the beginning, needing only
to grow, and the semen only somehow stimulated this growth.
But his beliefs about the constituents of semen are pretty amazing. Yeah.
So so again, as Balonzani, he believed this was just
like a chemical trigger, and that that was all that

(46:23):
the semen was actually contributing. And yet he was able
to take a look at it and he identified that
there was something kind of wormy going on in there.
There there was some sort of of wormy substance in
the semen. But how did he make sense of these, uh,
these wormy things in the semen? Well, based on popular
theories of the day concerning in the idea of inheritable

(46:45):
intestinal worms, the idea that you would have intestinal worms
and you would pass them on to children and there
into the grandchildren, etcetera, he thought that the sperm, what
we know now as the sperm, might be parasites and
that the seminal fluid alone served as the chemical trigger
for the red for the egg. And he he famously
this famously led to the use of pants on frogs

(47:07):
and other amphibians as an attempt to uh separate these
two entities to and to really figure out exactly what
was going on during the deposit of fluid in sexual reproduction,
so testing the hypothesis that male sex cells are actually
just parasites, and this led we could do a whole episode,

(47:27):
I think on the various experiments that followed putting tiny
pants on frogs, eventually working his way up to more
advanced organisms such as a dog. Um. But it it,
and it becomes. It becomes unintentionally hilarious at times, but
also ultimately illuminating for later later readers to look back
on his experiments and watch this progression towards an understanding

(47:50):
of the truth of sexual reproduction. Right, So that guy
was an ovist, but there were all these spermists as well,
who believed that the sperm cells were the individually full
formed humans shrunk down to tiny size. Yeah, and I
feel like these are more Um, these tended to be
more sort of scandalous and and and ridiculous to modern

(48:11):
viewers for a number of reasons, but in part because
there is such an inherent like chauvinistic ideology here, the
idea that will clearly it's all them, it's just the
man doing it. Yeah. It really feels like trying to
write the woman's agency out of the generation of new generations. Yeah.
In the seventeen and eighteen centuries, you had Dutch physicist

(48:32):
Nicholas heart Seeker, who who definitely took a hardline sperm
its approach, postulating that each sperm contained a completely preformed
humanoid or homunculous and this came with with with illustrations,
those illustrations I alluded to earlier. Yeah, they're fantastic, where
the slightly more grown up versions of the cells as

(48:53):
the homunculus gets bigger, look kind of like creepy Christmas
ornaments where they're like kind of a wavy, wobbly human
warm hanging from like a thread on the top of
his head. Yeah, it is, uh, they're they're they're kind
of creepy to look at, but also kind of yeah,
kind of holy too. Now, either way you cut it,
preformation theory posits something that sounds kind of absurd, because

(49:14):
let's think about the implications for a second. Take the
sper most position. Say you're Nicholas Heartseeker. If the spermus
were correct, then a man has within his sex organs
tiny versions of the men and women that will become
his descendants. And those tiny men inside that man must
also have within them the tiny men and women that

(49:35):
will become that first man's grandchildren and so on and
so forth. But of course, since they, you know, they're
tiny men within a tiny man, they must be proportionally
smaller to start with, Right, so you get this ongoing
regress of shrinking funeral future generations to fit inside perpetually
smaller generations. It's homunculi all the way down. And somebody

(49:59):
out there I need to stop using that metaphor and
then listening to Sturgill Simpson too much. I think, Uh,
somebody out there who's really Matt savvy should take this
thought experiment. Given this assumption of a sperm sized man
within every man, and then a proportionally sperm sized man
within the original tiny man, how many generations would you

(50:20):
need to go down before your homunculous was smaller than
one plank length? I like this, Yeah, because it would.
It would ultimately give you, like, like a hard limit
to the generations of man. Yeah, at some point, your
physics isn't gonna work anymore. How are you gonna make
that homunculous? Not out of particles, that's for sure. So

(50:41):
in all of this, we we've ultimately come back around
to this idea of homunculous theory. Uh and uh. Again,
we've talked about the homuncula a little bit in terms
of alchemy, where the creature is not quite a human
but he's a rational animal and uh and ultimately another
fictional page and humanity's dream of mastering life and death.
But Robert, how does this come back to our our

(51:01):
medieval and Renaissance art theme we were talking? Okay, So
first of all, it's important to note that there was
this wasn't a case of just clerics on one side,
alchemist on the other, and homunculi in between. I guess uh,
here's a here's a quick quote from William R. Newman
in Western Society and Alchemy from twelve hundred fifteen hundred,
publishing the Journal of Medieval History in Night. This quote

(51:23):
the fact that alchemists made analogies between the alchemistic process
and the Christian mysteries. It's not so strange when we
remember that in the Middle Ages most alchemists were clerics.
Although it is true that a number of clerics were
offended by Henry the sixth of England's appeal in which
the transmutation of metal was likened to the consecration during

(51:43):
Holy Mass, many others did not object. So the idea
here is that, yeah, don't don't think of the homunculous
as being just this thing that has talked about and
written about by individuals outside of the Church. No, the
the the the authors of homunk who is theory were
members of the clergy in many cases, and therefore it

(52:05):
makes sense that in terms of trying to figure out
the Christ Child, trying to figure out what uh an
infant Jesus would be, what God is a baby would
look like, they would end up drawing in some of
these ideas about homuncular theory, like making a sort of
perfect chemical miniature copy of an adult human, a creature

(52:27):
that is a preformed not only in body, but in
spirit and mind. Uh. And thus we have so many
of these depictions of the Christ Child as being this tiny,
perfect humanoid who is already regal and uh and holy
in its uh just bodily positioning and its mannerisms and
its appearance, or you can think of it as just

(52:48):
God without the limitations of actual human infancy. And I
guess whether an individual Christian finds that ideal that idea
appealing or not appealing, I guess just has to do
with their theology, right. Yeah, you know we were talking
earlier about whether one of the the man like baby
Jesus is would speak or not well apparently it was.

(53:09):
It was In many cases, the baby Jesus is not
meant to speak, but is communicating via gestures. So you
do see this in a lot of the artistic depictions.
There's kind of a like he's he's pointing out to
one side as if to say, oh, you've come to
see me. Great, we have some chairs and some modervas
over here. Um, if you will just be seated next
to the cows. Mary design says quote as a homunculous

(53:31):
Jesus simply grew in size within Mary's womb instead of
gradually acquiring a more complex body as did other unborn children,
sort of perfect from the beginning. Yeah, so I think
this is this is a very important argument to keep
in mind when looking at late medieval and medieval artistic
depictions of the Christ Child, that there is this, uh,

(53:53):
this attempt to understand theologically what that child will consist of.
And we have this this idea of the homoculi Jesus,
the idea of a preformed and perfect, tiny human Jesus
that would have emerged from Mary and then grown proportionally
there was very much in sync with many of the
alchemical ideas the day. Okay, Robert. Let's say I want

(54:14):
to make a homunculous not not a not a homunculous
theory version of Jesus, but just a regular an old
fashioned homunculous. Yeah, I'm getting interested in alchemy. I want
to bake a cake. Uh, and that cake is a
homunculous What should I do? Well, first of all, get
yourself a copy of a medieval text known as the
Book of the Cow, because it lays out some rather

(54:37):
grotesque and confusing instructions in the art of do it
yourself a monculi brewing. So let me tell you what
you'll need for this. Okay, this is straight from the
Book of the Cow. Uh. First of all, you'll need
wizard semen. And this makes sense from a from a
spermost point of view, right, Okay, if you have the
sperm of the wizard, you have probably everything you need
to build a human or humanoid creature. Why does it

(55:00):
need to be a wizard? Well, um, I'm not sure
if that means that you if you're engaging in the
homunculi creation, you're probably yourself a wizard or magician and
therefore engaged in a very solitary practice. Oh yeah, that
that could be it, or maybe there's something innately magical
about the magician seman. I'm not sure you're gonna need
animal blood. You're gonna need an actual cow or or

(55:24):
are you You're gonna need sulfur, a magnet. You're gonna
need green tutia or a sulfate of iron and a
large glass or lead vessel. Oh, and you'll need one
more thing. You'll need the sunstone. What's the sunstone? Robert Well,
the sunstone is a mystical phosphorescent elixir. So that this
is the point I know that you engage in mixology

(55:47):
as well. This is the point in the cocktail recipe
where you realize that that you absolutely cannot make the
drink because you're missing a vital, rare or expensive ingredient,
in this case, an ingredient that of course does not
actually exist. It is it is a mystical ingredient. And
if you have that, then yeah, you've got to light
up on making a homunculi. But if not, you're just

(56:08):
left with a you know, a vessel full of wizard
semen in cow blood. Yeah, very disappointing. Now I'll spare
everyone the additional instructions here but I'll link to a
blog post on the landing page for this episode is
Stuff to Blow Your Mind that rolls through. All you
have to do there to to grow the homunculi within
the cow and then allow it to develop to the

(56:30):
point where you can then harvest the homunculi and use
it as an ingredient in spells to say, turn yourself
invisible or give you the gift of flight. Yeah. Uh,
but in all things um alchemical, it's it's all rather
confusing and full of symbolism and hidden messages, just like
medieval art. Yeah exactly. All right, Well, that's gonna wrap

(56:53):
it up for our discussion today, but remember to go
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and check
out the image gallery that Robert is putting together of
some of these fantastic works of medieval and Renaissance art
showing the various stages of creepy baby development in art history.
That's right. You're just gonna have to see some of
these for yourself to, uh to to really get to
grasp what we're talking about here. Uh. And hey, when

(57:15):
you're there at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
you can check out all the other podcast episodes we've done.
You can check out blog posts and videos, as well
as links out to our various social media accounts such
as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram and so forth. As always,
thanks to our audio producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison
for doing a killer job. And if you want to

(57:37):
get in touch with us directly, as always, you can
email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stuff works dot com lit five five

(58:12):
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