Big-Eared Brown Bat Vessel (200–850 CE): Art, History and Details

Big-Eared Brown Bat Vessel (200–850 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This bat, perhaps shown opening its wings before taking flight, illustrates Moche artists’ keen interest in realism and in capturing activity at its peak. Moche bat symbolism may be linked to the animal’s paradoxical traits—for instance, bats fly but have fur rather than feathers. Such traits may have caused the Moche to link bats with transitional states, such as the passage between life and death. The vessel depicts a member of the Histiotus mochica species, a big-eared brown bat that researchers described in 2021 and, due to this vessel, named in honor of the Moche, also known as the Mochica.

Object facts

• Title: Big-Eared Brown Bat Vessel
• Date: 200–850 CE
• Culture: Central Andes, North Coast, Moche people
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: ceramic, slip
• Dimensions: Overall: 18.4 x 17.7 x 15.8 cm (7 1/4 x 6 15/16 x 6 1/4 in.)
• Collection: AA - Andes
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 2005.6

A detail from the museum

This vessel depicts a big-eared brown bat.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Simmons, Lisa, and Sue Bergh. "A South American Bestiary." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 48, no. 9 (November 2008): 5-7.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.