Centaur

• Centaurs, according to Greek mythology, were said to be the offspring of Ixion, son of Ares, and a cloud. These strange creatures had the head arms and chest of a man but the legs and lower half of a horse. In later myths and stories they sometimes had horns, wings or both. Back to Greek mythology, these Man-Horse beasts lived in Thessaly, fed on meat and were given to riotous revelries. They came to symbolize the dark, unruly forces of nature. They were usually depicted as drunken followers of Dionysus, except for Cheiron who was the tutor to several heroes...Cheiron (or Chiron) was a Centaur, half man and half horse, and the son of the Titan Cronos. Cronos disguised himself as a horse in order to seduce Philyra without his wife Rhea discovering the affair. Unlike other centaurs, who are descended from Ixion, Cheiron was among the gentlest, wisest, and most learned of creatures. As a result, he was asked to tutor several of the greatest of Greek heroes, including Achilles, Asclepius, Heracles, Jason, Aeneas, and Peleus. Being the son of a god he was immortal, but Heracles accidentally wounded him with a poisoned arrow when fighting the other Centaurs. According to one tradition, in order to be relieved of the unrelenting torment of the wound, he gave his immortality to the Titan Prometheus and allowed himself to die. According to another, he appealed to Zeus and was transformed into the constellation Sagittarius.Botticelli painted the Pallas and the Centaur for Lorenzo dei Medici (son of Pierfrancesco), perhaps intended as the third and concluding work of the trilogy begun by the Primavera and the Birth of Venus.