Owl

The classical tradition, inherited from Greek and Roman mythology, makes the owl a companion of the goddess of wisdom, and Renaissance humanist imagery sometimes draws on that association directly. But Northern Renaissance and later Spanish painting more often invert it: because the owl is a nocturnal hunter, associated with darkness and hidden sight, it became a folk symbol of foolishness, moral blindness, or the demonic — an owl watching a scene from the shadows is rarely a compliment to anyone in it.

That darker reading reaches an extreme in Francisco Goya's later work, where owls and bat-like creatures swarm around sleeping or vulnerable figures as agents of irrationality and nightmare — most famously in his print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, where the owls closing in on the slumped, sleeping artist are a direct visual argument about what happens when reason switches off.