Pallas and the Centaur

This was painted around 1482, in the same Florence and for the same family that gave Botticelli his mythologies. The woman is Pallas, wisdom, and she has a centaur by the hair, that half-horse creature standing for raw instinct. Look at her dress and you find the reason she is here. It is covered in interlocking rings, the personal device of the Medici, so this is not just an old fable about reason calming appetite. Wisdom taming the wild man was read in Florence as a portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici himself, who had recently gone unarmed to Naples and talked his way out of a war with its king. The olive branches she wears and carries were the plainest sign of that peace. Behind them the water opens toward a harbour, the direction Lorenzo had sailed.