Portraits of Melancholy — I Dürer’s Melencolia I, 1514
Bats, like most nocturnal animals and other lovers of the dark, tend to carry connotations of evil. The fifteenth-century scientist and theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote, “Just as the eye of a bat hides itself from the light of day, so does our soul’s eye hide from an understanding of what is clearest in nature.” Certainly the best known bat in all art before Goya’s flies in Melencolia I of 1514. Though its fearful head resembles that of the European brown bat, the creature’s widespread wings and curly tail are nearer Gothic fancy than zoological fact. A German scholar has suggested that Melancholy’s bat announces not only the subject of this print but also its cure. Boiled bats were prescribed in antiquity for ailments of the spleen, where excessive black bile, the melancholy fluid, was secreted.
(Eisler 1991, p. 98) Font.
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