Pallas and the Centaur

This large scale tempera painting by Sandro Botticelli is in similar style as his other mythological works created during the fifteenth century Renaissance period. It depicts a young female warrior holding a battle axe and halting a centaur by the hair before a stone gate. The exact identity of the two figures remained unclear until it was rediscovered in 1895 by Enrico Ridolfi at Palazzo Pitti and he gave the title ‘Pallas and Centaurs’ based on Giorgio Vasari’s description of Botticelli’s work. The female figure depicted here is Pallas Athena (Minerva), the Roman goddess of wisdom and war.And the Centaur represents a mythical creature, a combination of both man and beast and is associated with lust, violence and uncontrolled desires. Goddess Minerva is shown holding a halberd and she is wearing a white dress with repeated decorations of three diamond rings, a personal emblem of the Medici family. A branch of olive or myrtle is shown draping her body, and one branch is intertwining with her dress,arms and hair as well. Like his other works, Botticelli has used these two mythological figures to present moral and social ideals. Here, the painting focuses on the triumph of wisdom over passion and suggests that human reason can tame passion and can create a civilised order over chaos.