Pallas and the Centaur
| Pallas and the Centaur | |
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| Artist | Sandro Botticelli |
| Year | c. 1482 |
| Medium | Tempera on canvas |
| Dimensions | 204 cm × 147.5 cm (80 in × 58.1 in) |
| Location | Uffizi, Florence |
Pallas and the Centaur is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, c. 1482. It is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It has been proposed as a companion piece to his Primavera, though it is a different shape. The medium used is tempera paints on canvas and its size is 207 x 148 cm. The painting has been retouched in many places, and these retouchings have faded.
The life-size figures are from classical mythology and probably form an allegory. There is a centaur on the left, and a female figure holding a very elaborate and no doubt heavy halberd on the right. She is clutching the centaur's hair, and he seems submissive to her. The female figure was called Camilla in the earliest record of the painting, an inventory of 1499, but then in an inventory of 1516 she is called Minerva, the Roman equivalent of Pallas Athene, which remains her usual identification in recent times.
Camilla was a figure from specifically Roman mythology (if not just invented by Virgil for the Aeneid), a princess raised in the forest by her father, the exiled King Metabus, to be a virgin warrior huntress, for whom subduing a centaur might be considered all in a day's work. Pallas/Minerva, by contrast, is a major deity, goddess of wisdom, trade and much else. Centaurs are associated with uncontrolled passion, lust and sensuality, and at least part of the meaning of the painting is clearly about the submission of passion to reason. Various more specific personal, political and philosophical meanings along these general lines have been proposed.
The fine cloth of Pallas' clinging dress is decorated with the three ring insignia of the Medici family, confirming that the painting was made for the Medici family. She wears laurel branches, entwined around her arms and chest as a crown; these were often a punning allusion to Lorenzo de' Medici. On her back is a shield and she wears leather sandals on her feet. The halberd, especially in such large and elaborate form, was a weapon carried by guards rather than on the battlefield, and the centaur has apparently been arrested while preparing to shoot his bow.
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