page_title: Pallas and the Centaur
section_title: Interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Pallas and the Centaur / Interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: Personification of the city Trier from the Chronography of 354 Русский: Персонификация города Трира (Августы Тревиров) из Хронографа 354 года
context_page_description: 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 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. Art historian Arthur Frothingham suggested that she is Florencia, the personification of the city of Florence.
context_section_description: If given by Lorenzo de' Medici for his cousin's wedding, the two figures may represent the couple, aside from any other interpretations.  The lands of the bride's father, lord of Piombino on the Ligurian coast, and the island of Elba just off it, might be considered as part of Camilla's hunting grounds.  A possible interpretation of the painting is that Lorenzo de' Medici, if he was the main commissioner of this artwork, is represented by Pallas as he is overcoming the greed surrounding him – represented by the centaur – when he made a bold journey to Naples to reverse alliances and end the Pazzi War.  The Italian for the balls in the Medici coat of arms is palle, and their supporters were sometimes called palleschi, which adds to the plausibility of political interpretations. 
  Pallas is a figure of reason, restraining the beast of our nature – also represented by the centaur – by the hair and looking at it with no fear. This has been connected with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and also to the Renaissance Neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino's idea of the human soul as part animal and part human.   It has been interpreted as an allegory on the peace after the Pazzi wars.
  Frothingham posited that Botticelli’s idea for the painting could have come from an image in the Chronography of 354, a Roman calendar by Furius Dionysius Filocalus, the secretary to Pope Damasus I. The calendar depicts the personification of the city of Trier as a female warrior with a spear and shield holding the hair of a male figure with a bow and arrows by his feet. The male is smaller than the female and looks as if he is trying to escape her grasp. The two works are very similar and it is possible Botticelli got his idea for his painting from this image, having seen a copy.
caption: Personification of Trier from the Chronography of 354
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