Lamplit

presently behold
most Joyous a procession
of Curious Things.

This will probably make you snooze, but I found it curious nonetheless:

The first of Boethius's four subdivisions was similitude, used of the case of the noun ‘animal’ said of both real human beings and pictured human beings. Medieval logicians seem to have been totally unaware of the fact that the Greek word used by Aristotle was genuinely polysemous, meaning both animal and image, and they explained the extended use of ‘animal’ in terms of a likeness between the two referents — a likeness which had nothing to do with the significate of the term ‘animal’, which picks out a certain kind of nature, but which was nonetheless more than metaphorical in that the external shape of the pictured object does correspond to that of the living object. ... [bold mine. -ed]

What it looks like happened is that in Aristotle's time a person and an image of that person may have been thought to be in some strong sense the same. As if things containing one's image were a part of one's body. By the time of the medieval logicians, the original sense - that is to say, not the definition itself but the way in which the definition is meant - was lost. Maybe unable to process the complications of this view, (recall superstitions about paintings and photographs) it was in some way discarded. The notion of similitude in analogy seems to have lost a lot of power inadvertently - perhaps not entirely in this fashion, but being ignorant of no more than their teachers and their interpretations of the often difficult Aristotle and the other Philosophers, it may have taken hold.

To wit, the analogic method became a process of identifying similarities between external shapes - and while the deeper sense of shared identity through form still persisted, it seems like for most Westerners who are not superstitious it became implicit and unconscious.

The superstitious aspect of this idea probably relates to a misunderstanding of soul, how it is the 'anima' of someone can be present in images of them, but yet this would pose no threat to them. It is in the same way that a projector of light can come to no real harm by attacks on its projection.