Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur
This painting, along with the Primavera, was in the palace of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici in Via Larga, where it hung above the door to an antechamber, as stated in the invetory compiled in 1498 at the death of his brother Giovanni.

The meaning of the painting, where a young woman framed in the scenario of a marine veduta, grasps a lock of hair on the head of a centaur, is still enignmatic. Armed with a lance, she is wearing a transparent robe decorated with olive branches and embroidered with a coat-of-arms consisting of three or four interwoven diamond rings: the motto Deo amante, "devoted to God", the emblem of Cosimo the Elder and then of the other members of the Medici family, among them Lorenzo the Magnificent. It may be that the canvas was the wedding gift of the Magnificent to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, his cousin and pupil known for his erudition, who was married in 1482. The allegory seems to draw inspiration from the contrast between two natures, variously interpreted as Chastity and Lust, Humility and Pride, or Instict and Reason. Botticelli may have conceived of the theme after a stay in Rome, where among other antiquities he had studied a sarcophagus, from which the figure of the centaur derives.