How the bat became a gothic motif, and why it means blessing in China

The bat is a small insect eating mammal that hunts at dusk, and almost nothing about the motif comes from the animal. It comes from a decision medieval painters made about wings, a pun in Chinese, and one novel published in 1897. Those three threads produced a creature that means evil in one tradition and five specific blessings in another, from identical raw material. The detail worth knowing is that the vampire bat was named after the vampire of European folklore rather than the other way round. Here is how each reading was built.

The animal, which is stranger than the motif

Bats are the order Chiroptera, the word means hand wing, and they account for something like a fifth of all mammal species. They are the only mammals capable of powered flight. The wing is a hand: the bones are fingers, enormously elongated, with skin stretched between them, which is why a bat wing has visible joints where a bird wing has feathers.

Most of the small insect eating species navigate by echolocation, calling and reading the returning echoes, which is how they catch moths in the dark at speed. They hang upside down because the tendons in their feet lock under the animal's own weight, so hanging costs no muscular effort at all. A roosting bat is at rest in a way a perching bird is not.

Three species out of well over a thousand feed on blood, all of them in the Americas, and the common vampire bat is the one everybody means. The important bit of sequence: the folklore came first. European vampire belief is documented well before naturalists reached South America, and when they got there they named the blood feeding bat after the folklore. The bat did not create the legend, the legend named the bat.

Medieval painters made a decision about wings

Early Christian art gave angels the wings of birds, borrowed from classical victory figures. By the later Middle Ages the opposite convention had hardened: the enemy got the wings of a bat. Giotto's Last Judgement in the Arena Chapel, painted around 1305, is one of the works where you can see the new type settled, and devils with membranous wings appear across European painting from that point.

The logic is not about the animal's behaviour, it is about daylight. Feathers belong to the birds you see in the sky at noon. A membrane belongs to the thing crossing a field at dusk. Giving one side feathers and the other side skin split the heavens into two shifts, and the split has held for seven hundred years.

Dragons inherited the same wings, which is why the dragon of western art is a bat winged lizard while the dragon of Chinese art has no wings at all. Once the convention existed, every artist needed only the outline.

Night, melancholy and the print that fixed it

Albrecht Durer's engraving Melencolia I, from 1514, carries its own title on a banner held by a bat winged creature flying across a twilight sky. That is a long way from a devil. Here the bat stands for the mood: the hour, the inwardness, the sense of a mind working in the dark. The image was reproduced endlessly and it carried the association with it.

Goya made the same connection explicit at the end of the eighteenth century. The print usually known as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from 1799, has a figure slumped over a desk while owls and bats pour out of the darkness behind him. The bats are not demons. They are what fills the space reason has left.

By the time of the Gothic revival, the bat was available for architecture and decoration as a general sign of night. Victorian designers used it on ironwork, on ceramics and in jewellery, often alongside moths, spiders and crescents, which is where most of the vocabulary modern dark decoration draws on was actually assembled.

Dracula, and the shape of the last hundred years

The vampire of literature was not a bat to begin with. John Polidori's The Vampyre, published in 1819, has an aristocrat and no animal transformation. Varney the Vampire, serialised through the 1840s, has no bat either. Bram Stoker put the two together in Dracula in 1897, by which point travel writing and natural history had made the blood feeding bats of South America common knowledge in Britain.

Film did the rest. The silent Nosferatu in 1922 and the Universal Dracula in 1931 made the bat and the cloak a single visual idea, and the resemblance between a spread bat wing and a raised cloak is the reason it works. That resemblance is the whole trick, and it is why a bat silhouette still reads as theatrical rather than zoological.

This is also why the motif reads as costume rather than as horror now. A bat in decoration is a quotation from a hundred years of film, and most people respond to the quotation rather than to the animal. Something like a small bat with a long drop is working in that register.

In Chinese decoration the same animal means blessing

The Chinese word for bat, fu, is a homophone for the word meaning blessing or good fortune. Chinese decorative art is built on that kind of pun to an extent that is hard to overstate, and the bat became one of the standard auspicious motifs: on porcelain, on lacquer, on textiles, on furniture, on imperial robes.

Five bats together, wufu, stand for the five blessings, traditionally listed as long life, wealth, health, virtue and a natural death at the end of a full span. They are drawn stylised, symmetrical, often in red, and arranged in a ring or scattered across a ground. Nothing about the drawing is sinister, because nothing in the tradition it comes from asks it to be.

Set the two side by side and the lesson is the same one the owl teaches. The animal supplies a silhouette. Everything else is supplied by the culture doing the looking, and a scatter of small bats across a dark ground, as on the bat blanket, sits much closer to the Chinese pattern tradition than to anything gothic, whatever the shop it came from.

Why the silhouette survives being made small

The bat is one of the most efficient outlines in decoration, and the reason is the trailing edge. A spread wing gives you a scalloped curve broken by the finger bones, which means the shape carries information even at a few millimetres across, where a bird silhouette collapses into a blob. Symmetry does the rest: two wings and a small body is a shape the eye completes for itself.

That is why the form appears so often at jewellery scale. A pair of wings with no body still reads as a bat, because the scalloped edge is the identifying feature rather than the animal's head.

Cast in the round, the problem reverses. A hanging bat is a compact parcel and casts well, but a flying one has thin membranes that are difficult to fill and easy to bend. Small solid castings such as the pair of cast brass bats work by keeping the wings tight to the body, which is the same constraint that shapes almost every small cast animal.

Questions people actually ask

Why are bats associated with vampires?

Bram Stoker made the link in Dracula in 1897, and film cemented it in the 1920s and 1930s. The blood feeding bats of South America were named after European vampire folklore, not the reverse, so the belief is older than the animal's reputation.

Why do devils have bat wings in art?

It was a convention that hardened in later medieval European painting: angels kept the feathered wings borrowed from classical art, and the opposition was given the membranous wings of a creature that flies at dusk. Dragons in western art inherited the same wings.

What does a bat symbolise in Chinese art?

Good fortune. The word for bat is a homophone of the word for blessing, so bats are a standard auspicious motif, and five bats together represent the five blessings of long life, wealth, health, virtue and a natural death.

Are bats blind?

No. Bats can see, and the larger fruit eating species rely on sight. The small insect eating species hunt by echolocation, calling and reading the echoes, which works in total darkness where vision would not.