Le centaure et le dragon

A centaur was, for most ancient writers, a creature of appetite, half horse and given to violence. One was different. Chiron, wise and gentle, taught medicine and music to heroes, and it was that rare learned centaur who drew two 19th-century French poets Redon admired, Maurice de Guerin and Leconte de Lisle, each of whom wrote the centaur from the inside, as a being torn between animal and mind. Redon read them, and that tension is what he paints here around 1908, the man-horse set against a dragon in saturated, dreamlike colour. The outcome of the fight is left unclear. What holds him is the doubled nature of the creature itself, part reason and part hoof and muscle, facing a monster at the edge of an imagined world.