The Centaur from the Medici to Machiavelli

Abstract

This preliminary iconological inquiry aims to show that the Machiavellian image of the centaur Chiron—which was to enjoy extraordinary fortune in Western political thought—must be situated within Medicean ideology, where it had already assumed a highly significant role as early as the time of Cosimo the Elder. The figure of the centaur governed by Pallas—armed yet pacific Wisdom, whose very epithet alludes to the palle of the Medici coat of arms—may be taken to encapsulate the characteristic Renaissance impulse to recast the classical in Christian terms, an impulse that reached its apex in the ideological glorification of the Medici family as rulers of a new Athens coextensive with the new messianic Jerusalem. It was only with the elevation to the papacy of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s son, however, that the centaur acquired its fullest duplicity and symbolic potency—openly invoked in The Prince and displayed on the frontispiece of the first printed edition of La Mandragola. The paradigmatic twofold prince—at once humane, devout, and merciful, yet also libidinous, deceitful, and violent—is none other than Leo X: the pontiff in whom sacral and temporal power, Roman libido dominandi and Christian redemptive charisma, coexist in a dialectical tension, ceaselessly hybridizing one another. It is through the mediation of this papal centaur that the prince is secularized.

In Florentine humanistic and Renaissance culture, the image of the centaur acquires particular significance, enjoying a remarkable and polymorphous fortune in classical mythology and culture. The human-horse hybrid symbolizes the immanence of the beastly within the human, the violence of instinctual life within the rational animal, the irreducible power of chaos that always arises amid the attempt to achieve order and form in living. This symbolism unfolds against the broader horizon shaped by the encounter and clash between Christian revelation and the multifaceted pagan memory, characterized by the relationship between logos and myth, symbol and concept, history and ontology, ideality and contingency.

The most striking and disquieting representation of the centaur appears in chapter XVIII of The Prince. There, Machiavelli’s subversive “invention” of the virtuous politician is depicted through the ambiguous figure of the mythological monstrum, half-man and half-horse: the first indicative of the rationality of laws, the second of the beastliness of force—of the libido for power, blood, sex, and deception.

1. Machiavelli’s Centaur Prince Between Classical Sources and the Papal Context

As a symbol of this paradoxically in/disciplined political wisdom that the artist of the state intends to instill in the prince, Machiavelli points to Chiron—the wise and humane centaur, master of medicine, music, and temperance, but also of hunting and war. He embodies, at once, the figure of the healer and that of the killer.1 Furthermore, the bestial component of the centaur prince is split into two specific natures: leonine and vulpine,2 the latter of which, however, ends up “merging” with the human nature that ought to be characterized by the rationality of law. The “legal” human component, moreover, is specified as a “generazione di combattere” (way of contending) and thus retains a latent violence that symbolically aligns it with the beast. Human nature—and therefore the very ethical, political, and theological virtue that should promote it—ends up differing within itself, revealing itself to be equivocal. Even though called by its rational component and by the dominant ethos to be upright, religious, compassionate, and charitable, the prince’s person is often forced to pretend to be such, simulating an appearance of virtue beneath which lies a profoundly deceptive, impious, faithless, and ruthless substance.

The notion of virtue thus divides into two irreducible dimensions: an ideal norm and a pragmatic criterion. These dimensions enter into tension with one another. Under certain circumstances, religious devotion and honesty lead to political ruin; conversely, deception and impiety may secure stability, success, and therefore glory. This structural ambiguity reveals the “indecent” core of human rationality, rendered as a mere pragmatic act, a violent conjectural gamble, an instinctual desire for life, and a rational assurance of its protection and enhancement. Reason is not metaphysically ordered or guaranteed by its autonomy. Rather, it becomes a wholly contingent, adaptive capacity to respond to chance, always shifting, calculated, yet risky adaptation to contingent necessities, vulpine precisely because it is double, as it is different, elusive, and uncertain.3 Being is altered by becoming, substance is invaded by contingency, and reason is the timely intelligence of the deferral of life and meaning, which both inhabit and exceed it. The influence of Epicurean and Lucretian thought becomes evident at this point. Ontological order is drawn into a material field marked by collision and dispersion, where fragile configurations struggle to endure and expand, yet remain vulnerable to chance. The reference to the animal, then, cannot be reduced to metaphor. It signals the deepest principle of life itself, characterized by an ineradicable libido for power and domination—through violence, seduction, deception, and trickery. From this dark, animalistic, and instinctual foundation, the rational human being cannot detach himself. On the contrary, he depends upon it and repeatedly returns to it. In this sense, he discloses his centaurial condition: a political animal precisely insofar as he is a rational beast.4

It is thus striking that the only explicit historical embodiment of the centaur-prince in chapter XVIII of The Prince is a pontiff. Machiavelli presents Alexander VI, who stands as the supreme incarnation of the humanity of law, theologically grounded, and yet in fact is a bestial prince, an exemplary cunning fox and bloodthirsty lion, intent on creating political greatness and earthly glory through the “instrument” of his son, the ruthless Cesare Borgia.5 That a pope should serve as the paradigmatic figure of the centaur—at once religious and irreligious, sacred and profane, Christian and impious—is all the more sinister when one considers how the man-beast was interpreted by Dante as a murderous and infernal figure. In the Inferno,6 the centaurs led by Chiron appear as proud and furious executors of the contrapasso for those violent against others (together with those violent against themselves and against God), particularly as archers of tyrants. Murderers are punished by being immersed in the blood of their crimes, which feeds the river Phlegethon,7 a tragic counterpart to the redeeming blood of Christ, the saving victim. Machiavelli, then, would seem to intentionally present the centaur prince as an anti-type of Christ the God-man,8 as Leo Strauss has perceptively pointed out.9

The paradoxical figure of the centaur pope should not be read as a blasphemous provocation or as a denigration of Christian mystery and papal authority. Such an interpretation would be implausible in a treatise intended for Leo X. Rather, the image acknowledges the historical reality of the Renaissance papacy, an institution that was structurally ambiguous, at once sacred and temporal. It embodied a Christological claim while simultaneously adopting political practices that were overtly worldly and, at times, inhuman. Alexander VI, Julius II, and the two Medici pontiffs operated as shrewd and often ruthless rulers. Their policies sought not only to safeguard the Church’s temporal and theological autonomy but also to consolidate dynastic and nepotistic principalities. The centaur is truly an emblematic figure of the dual nature of papal power.10

Chapter XXV of The Prince rearticulates this centaur-like dialectic between the human and the bestial—between leonine force and vulpine calculation—within a different conceptual framework. Machiavelli distinguishes between the politician who is “by nature impetuous” (who acts with “impeto,” “violenza,” impatient boldness) and the one who is “by nature cautious” (who acts with “rispetto,” “arte,” “pazienza;” Prince XXV, 12). This distinction unfolds within his broader argument concerning the variable correspondence between nature and changing times. The success of human virtue depends on its contingent alignment with circumstances shaped by fortune.11 Such alignment can never be fully determined by choice. This dependence reveals the limited capacity of centaur-like virtue to adapt, anticipate, and restrain fortune’s excess. The prudent, fox-like ruler may falter when the times demand force and audacity. Conversely, the impetuous, lion-like ruler may fail when circumstances require cold, prudently considered choices, subject to the foresighted calculation of opportunities. Yet the chapter resists the conclusion that political success must rest on this unstable correspondence. Instead, it concludes with an evident violence that “furiously” contrasts with cold rational analysis, deciding to favor the “impetuous” prince—who is young and bold—as the one most favored by fortune, a woman who wants to be dominated and struck.12 Significantly, Julius II—the elderly pontiff (!)—is presented as the paradigmatic embodiment of this youthful and impetuous energy. In him, leonine force, rather than cold fox-like prudence, appears capable of mastering fortune, which is a woman.13

It must therefore be acknowledged that the centaur-pope functions as the concrete preceptor of Machiavelli’s “Chiron,” the tutor of the new prince.14 This hybrid, half man, half beast, thus emerges as a revealing counter-figure to the pontiff understood as alter Christus. In The Prince, the only explicitly “centaur-like” exempla in chapters XVIII and XXV are papal: first Alexander VI, then Julius II. Their traits ultimately converge in Leo X, the enigmatic ruler who “non predica mai altro che pace e fede, e dell’una e dell’altra è inimicissimo.”15 The son of Lorenzo the Magnificent harbors within himself, beneath an appearance of peace and clemency, a centaur-like animal component. This composite nature unites the cunning, duplicitous, and faithless vulpine qualities associated with Pope Borgia and the impetuous, ferocious leonine force embodied by della Rovere.

Classical motifs, Christian symbolism, and political pragmatism therefore converge in Machiavelli’s construction of the politician as centaur. This figure, compelled to adapt its nature to shifting circumstances, retracts and redeems the condemnation that Cicero directed against the tyrannical “bestial” man, whose character pulsates with the alienissima of fox and lion,16 within the vital and timely metamorphic framework inherited from Xenophon.17 By contrast, the pontiff—vicar of Christ and earthly god, yet also temporal princeps principorum—appears as a profoundly metamorphic subject. His authority contaminates Christian faith and libido dominandi, sacred law and unscrupulous, tyrannical earthly ambition. The supreme sacred office—the vicar of Christ, the God-man—thus discloses a foundation shaped by an irreducibly animal drive for domination. A further consideration supports Machiavelli’s recourse to the centaur as emblem of the new prince. The prince-pontiff had become a Medici. The Medici lineage, in turn, maintained a long-standing elective affinity with the mythical medicus, the healer and instructor of princes and heroes.

2. The Fortune of the Centaur from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

In medieval and Renaissance culture, the mythical figure of the centaur—paradoxical in its fusion of human and animal natures within a single “person”18—enjoyed a distinctly ambiguous reception. On the one hand, it was commonly interpreted as an image of the devil and as a symbol of untamed nature hostile to reason and humanity. In this sense, the centaur came to signify unrestrained sexuality, destructive violence,19 and a tyrannical libido dominandi.20

Michelangelo’s first sculptural work (Figure 1) and a celebrated canvas (Figure 2) by the “wild,” (“salvatico”) as Giorgio Vasari described him, Piero di Cosimo, testify to the fascination with the myth of the centaur in Florence at the close of the fifteenth century. In their vortex of violence, these works evoke the unrestrained Dionysian energy for which the monstrous creature serves as a symbol.21 The furious struggle between Lapiths and centaurs, as the myth recounts, was sparked by the centaur Eurytus, son of Ixion. Drunk at the wedding feast of Pirithous—king of the Lapiths and son of Ixion himself—and his bride Hippodamia, he attempted to abduct the bride in order to possess her by force (as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses XII, vv. 210–536). Yet Piero’s painting also records the irreducibly human dimension within this dual being, as in the marital bond set against the unrestrained libido that seeks to violate it. Thus, the image includes the poignant episode of the centauress Hylonome, who kills herself upon the body of her husband Cyllarus, the most beautiful of the centaurs. After trying, through repeated kisses, to hold back his departing soul—“oraque ad ora,/admovet atque animae fugienti obsistere temptat” (Piero illustrates precisely the verses from Metamorphoses XII, vv. 393–428, in particular vv. 424–425)—Hylonome pierces herself with the very spear that had slain him.

However, in classical and early Christian sources, the figure of the centaur Chiron enjoys great renown, as testified by, among others, Homer, Pindar, Xenophon, Apollonius of Rhodes, Ovid, Pliny, Statius, Servius (commenting on Virgil), Lactantius, Isidore of Seville, and Berchorius.22 This tradition influenced the Florentine context, from Boccaccio, through Salutati, and up to the Medici-era Neoplatonist Landino, interpreter of Dante and, as we will see, teacher of Poliziano and inspiration for Botticelli. Also worth noting is the original rationalistic perspective of Lucretius, who, in De rerum natura, sought to demonstrate in physical terms the wholly imaginary origin of monstrous creatures, especially centaurs.23

But let us return to the myth. According to various sources—with the exception of Chiron, “iustissimus homo”24 (and Pholus, a minor variant)—all other centaurs, lustful and violent,25 were born from the union of the lascivious Ixion—unjust and the murderer of his father-in-law, as well as the prototype of tyrants—and Nephele, a cloud that Jupiter had made to assume the likeness of Hera/Juno (the goddess of sovereignty), whom he desired but only possessed in illusion.26 For this outrage, Jupiter, who had even brought him to heaven, punished the ungrateful and aspiring usurper Ixion by condemning him to spin forever in the heavens or bound to a wheel in Tartarus.27 According to Planciades Fulgentius,28 and thus for Boccaccio, who draws from him (in Genealogia IX, 27, 5–6), Ixion’s wheel becomes a symbol of the instability of tyrannical power, perpetually tormented by its precariousness. Similarly, the centaurs born of Ixion and Nephele are interpreted as the armed satellites of the tyrant, whose memory is echoed by the deadly army of the Devil in Canto XII of Dante’s Inferno.29

Chiron, by contrast—“semivir et flavi corpore mixtus equi,” Ovid, Fasti V, 380—was, according to all sources, an exceptional centaur, since he was the son of Saturn/Cronos. Cronos had transformed himself into a horse in order to violate the Oceanid Philyra, who had, in turn, assumed the form of a mare to escape him. In one version of the myth, after uniting with Cronos—who, surprised by his wife Rhea, fled by taking the shape of a horse—Philyra gave birth to a son who embodied his father’s fleeting metamorphosis. Both wild and cunning, yet also wise, Chiron was renowned for instructing humans in the arts of hunting and war. He was also described as a matchmaker who, echoing his father’s violent act, taught how a woman might be subdued by any means.30 Above all, he is celebrated as a discoverer of medicinal herbs, the first physician and surgeon, and a supreme master of mathematics, astronomy, and music.31 Because he commands the arts of harmony and temperance, he appears as the philosopher-centaur,32 capable of restraining and transforming his most sensual animal nature into wisdom governed by reason.33 For this reason, he is exalted as the wisest and most rigorous tutor of gods (Asclepius, god of medicine), heroes, and princes (Heracles, Jason, Actaeon, Achilles, Theseus, Aeneas). He thus becomes a symbol of the education of power and strength: Chiron urges the mastery of the libido dominandi and the conversion of furious ambition into the desire to establish a just order, secured by strength guided by wisdom.34 In this sense, the philosopher-centaur can even embody the aspiration toward a fuller humanity, constituted by orientation toward the Highest Good.

From this perspective, Chiron’s ultimate destiny is exalting. A healer who suffers an incurable wound unintentionally inflicted by his pupil Achilles,35 he chooses death rather than eternal suffering and relinquishes his immortality to Prometheus.36 His extraordinary wisdom, culminating in this painful sacrifice, earns him catasterism: his assumption into the heavens and transformation into the constellation Centaurus.37

Within a Christian moralizing interpretation of classical myth, Chiron could thus be read as a mythological prefiguration of Christ and moralized as a sagittary hunter of souls. Thus, in the Last Judgment (1303) painted in the Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto places a centaur beside Christ enthroned—God in glory, yet marked by the red robe of the Passion, the stigmata, and the wound in his side. The centaur becomes a symbol of the dual nature of the single person of the incarnate Word, who accepted death to give life to humanity.38

Erasmus himself recalls Chiron’s kenotic and Solomonic wisdom in The Praise of Folly,39 while in the final expanded edition of the Adagia he presents him more ambiguously: first, as one who suffers an incurable wound despite possessing a healing hand; second, as a figure who teaches both seductive music and centaurial ferocity, politically instrumental in the pursuit of tyranny, as in the case of Pericles.40 It should be noted that, in Latin, fides signifies not only trust and assent to a given word but also the string of a lyre or cithara—the one struck by the musician. We shall later see how, in the Dominican Tommaso Sardi, the figure of the centaur overlaps with that of the biblical Moses and thus with the Roman pontiff of whom he is a figure, thereby foreshadowing the Christological mystery of the single person in two natures.

Finally, in his merciless critique of Christianity in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Bruno, through the catasterism of Chiron, offers a parody of Christ’s deification—a fable simultaneously demythologized by the mocking Momus yet, at least provisionally, preserved in Machiavellian fashion by Jupiter the “philosopher,” though reduced to an effective theological-political fiction.41

The centaur invoked in Machiavelli’s Prince is precisely Chiron, the wise educator of princes, who—like the infernal centaurs in Dante—is nonetheless violent, armed with bow and quiver, and thus both hunter and warrior;42 he is also lustful and capable of seductive deception, as the centaur in the Mandragola will show. I will attempt to demonstrate how Machiavelli’s brilliant metaphor, though indebted to classical models (Xenophon, Ovid, then Cicero, Pliny, Statius) and Florentine ones (Dante, Boccaccio, Salutati, Landino), is nonetheless activated in relation to a concrete reality he seeks to intercept and relaunch, both praising and exhorting. Machiavelli is aware that wise Chiron—physician, musician, and warrior—served as a mythological symbol favored by the Medici, a classical counterpart to the family’s protectors, the sainted physicians Cosmas and Damian. The centaur medicus had in fact become an ambiguous emblem of Medicean power, capable of taming the violence of passions—its own and others’—and of sublimating, even toward a messianic “divinization,” the libido dominandi of the prince in pursuit of greatness and lasting glory.43 The papal elections first of Giovanni de’ Medici and then of Clement VII represent the theological-political culmination of this process of catasterism of the Medicean centaur, who, nevertheless, could not but “return to earth” to unleash his irrepressible libido dominandi.

In the following pages, I will present a series of significant testimonies to the image of Chiron the centaur as a Medicean symbol—both princely and papal—underlying Machiavelli’s highly original interpretation, which immediately grafted itself, with ambiguous and subversive force, onto the encomiastic tradition from which it derives.

3. The Centaurs of Palazzo Medici and the Pulpits of San Lorenzo: Donatello, Bertoldo, and Cosimo

The frieze in the central courtyard of Palazzo Medici on Via Larga in Florence features eight medallions inspired by ancient, engraved gems owned by the Medici. They were sculpted in the 1460s at the commission of Cosimo the Elder, who entrusted their conception and design to Donatello,44 very likely under the influence of Ficino. Their execution is now attributed to Donatello’s most gifted collaborator, Bertoldo di Giovanni. One of the medallions (Figure 3) depicts a centaur carrying a basket of fruit/Medici balls, a lion skin, and a staff, which should be identified as a long torch.45 Chiron, medicus and wise, temperate teacher, clearly alludes to the Medici and to their moderate rule.46 The lion skin refers to the marzocco, symbol of Florence, thus representing the city as “conquered” by the Medicean centaur.47

The Medici are clearly symbolized by the coat of arms with six balls/bezants in the basket, depicted as fruits to be interpreted as the beneficial grace of which the virtuous centaur is the bearer. The frieze is of the highest significance: Chiron is invoked in the courtyard of the Medici palace, “rege dignum” (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini), at whose center Donatello’s bronze David was brought from the “old house” and placed atop a tall column as a symbol of the Florentine republic “liberated” and strengthened by the Medici. The scene celebrated Cosimo’s regime. The decoration of the inner courtyard of the palace, its “visible heart,” fulfilled a public function of propaganda and political mediation between the power of the ruling family and its allies or clients.48 In short, the “messianic” family49—which had hosted Pope Eugenius IV and the ecumenical council, promoted the (albeit short-lived) union with the Eastern Church, welcomed the emperor of Constantinople, and sought to make Florence a new Athens—represented itself not only through David but also in the figure of Chiron: physician, warrior, yet also illuminator (as the tall torch he brandishes makes clear), wise educator of princes, and bearer of peace, prosperity, culture, and religious piety.

The image of the centaur reappears in an extraordinary setting: in the frieze crowning the main panels of the bronze Passion Pulpit and the Resurrection Pulpit in the “Medicean” church of San Lorenzo, rebuilt by Filippo Brunelleschi. The two pulpits are the last extraordinary masterpieces commissioned by the pater patriae to “Donatello the sculptor, body and soul of Cosimo,”50 yet left unfinished at the master’s death in 1466. Their execution certainly involved his principal assistants, Bertoldo di Giovanni51 and Bartolomeo Bellano. The pulpits had been conceived in close connection with Cosimo’s tomb and therefore possessed a highly significant commemorative function, carefully coordinated with the pater patriae himself.52

To understand how even the evocation of the most sacred scenes could convey an encomiastic intention, one may note the anonymous poem of more than five thousand verses, Le Onoranze Fiorentine del 1459 (The Florentine Celebrations of 1459), composed between 1459 and 1468 to celebrate the Medici regime on the occasion of the lavish receptions of the adolescent Galeazzo Maria Sforza, count of Pavia—hosted from 17 April to 3 May 1459—and of Pope Pius II, who was preparing the crusade to the Holy Land and was received from 25 April to 5 May. The work offers a hyperbolic exaltation of the just and providential rule of Cosimo, lord of Florence, and of his son Piero. Cosimo’s unjust exile from Florence (1433) and his subsequent triumphant return (1434), which gave rise to the Medicean “civil principate,” are compared to Christ’s death and resurrection: the first unworthily caused by the envy of the wicked, the second by the omnipotent justice of God:

Fùrano a Cristo i suoi membri confitti/in su la croce santa da’ Giudei/per rabbia e ’nvidia, non già per dilitti:/così intervenne l’anni trentatrei/con Mille quattrocento, che l’invidia/poté in terra quanto in cielo e dei./Reparò Iddio alla mortale insidia,/ma Cosmo fu cacciato dalle mie/case con rabbi<a>, superbia e perfidia./Ma come Gesù Cristo il terzo dìe/in corpo e ’nn alma resurse da mmorte/e glorïoso poi nel ciel salìe,/così, per ordin della eccelsa corte,/il popol mio magnanimo e venu<s>to/Cosimo richiamò dentro alle porte./Con quel trïunfo che l’imperio Agusto/già ebbe in Roma, Cosimo tornòe./Or vedi quanto Iddio repremia il giusto!/E come Iddio sé stesso vendicò<e>/per le man’ d’altri sopra i giudei cani,/che per tutto gli sperse e divoròe,/così di que’ che s’imbrattâr le mani/al mal di Cosmo: fùran ben puniti/e spersi come miseri profane.53

A genuine catasterism of Cosimo is thus celebrated, one fully worthy of comparison with that of Chiron. The exalted virtue of the pater patriae appears so exceptional as to merit the grace of transforming his mortal nature into an immortal one:

E tanta fama ogni ora in quest’uom sale/che penetra fra’ cieli in ogni stella./Io direi ch’ella avesse fatto male,/s’i’ potesse riprender la Natura,/ad aver fatto Cosimo mortale:/però ch’una sì nobil crëatura,/di tal virtù e grazia e gloria degna,/esser vorrebbe ed immortale e pura.54

In the Pulpit of the Passion, or of the Gospel, on the principal side of the work, two centaurs bearing clypei surmount a column that divides the most sacred scenes of Christ’s Crucifixion and Deposition, within which Cosimo and his wife Contessina had themselves portrayed by Donatello (Figure 4).55

Similarly, in the Resurrection Pulpit, or of the Epistle, (Figure 5) two centaurs bearing a clipeus reappear at the center of the frieze of the principal panel of the composition, within which one reads: “OPUS DONATELLO FLO[RENTINO].”56 In this case, the centaurs enter into an even more direct visual relation with the core of the scene, since they no longer rest upon a dividing column, as in the Pulpit of the Passion. Rather, the two mythological monstra closely surmount the extraordinary and dramatically intense figure of a spectral Christus patiens: with eyes barely open and his body still wrapped in the shroud, seeming to struggle to rise, Jesus emerges from death, which nonetheless appears still to clutch him.

The unsettling originality of Donatello’s risen Christ sharpens the problem still further: why is the centaur placed in a central position, surmounting the two most decisive and foundational sacred scenes of Christian revelation? The reason for this atopic placement must carry a meaning of exceptional weight, all the more so if, in the clipeus they support on the Resurrection Pulpit, Donatello chose to inscribe his own name.57 One might venture the hypothesis that the centaur was selected to signify—much as in Giotto’s Christ Judge in the Scrovegni Chapel—the dual nature of Christ as a “living dead” figure: immortal made mortal in order to grant immortality to humankind (Prometheus!), and then ascending to heaven; physician and teacher of wisdom and redemptive transformation; healer who endures an incurable wound. By witnessing the scenes of Christ’s death and resurrection, the mythical centaurs of classical tradition would thus be called to attest the universal scope of the divine redemptive mystery, in its power to transfigure the animal into the spiritual.58

Behind Donatello, however, stood his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, whom Vasari himself depicts, as we have seen, examining the wax models of the reliefs for the two pulpits designed for the “Medicean” church of San Lorenzo and conceived in close relation to the tomb of the pater patriae, located in the crypt beneath the altar. The central placement of the centaurs above the two most sacred scenes of the Christian mystery can scarcely be interpreted as a merely decorative device; they must have carried a precise symbolic meaning, even more so in a culture shaped by Ficinian Christian Neoplatonism and permeated by the allegorical interpretation of classical myth reconciled with Christian revelation. The centaurs, therefore, can only be understood as “Chironized,” entirely stripped of their violent and lustful dimension and instead ennobled as symbols of spiritual (and political) medicine, and thus of idealizing harmony. They seem to recapitulate, as witnesses to the deepest Christian mysteries, the Florentine Neoplatonic interpretation of classical antiquity as a figural prophecy of Christian revelation. In this sense they would serve to exalt Cos(i)mo/Cosmos de’ Medici, the agent of Florence’s becoming a cosmos and of the constitution of a new Athens capable of reconciling classical culture and Christianity, the Orthodox and the Roman Church (one thinks of the Council of Florence of 1439 convened by Eugenius IV, to which Cosimo guaranteed political and financial protection, hosting it in Florence for nearly a decade), the historical, political, and financial “body” and the theological-religious “soul.” Placed in a strategic position within Donatello’s final paired masterpiece in the church of San Lorenzo—commissioned and financed by the Medici—the centaurs would thus represent in symbolic form the patron of the two pulpits himself: the learned and prudent, yet strong and powerful Cosimo,59 who only a few years earlier had wished a Medicean centaur to be reproduced in the courtyard of the palace on Via Larga.

In short, the scandalous proximity between the ambiguous mythological monstra and the supreme redemptive events of the God-made-man would testify to the diffusion in Medicean Florence of Ficino’s thought promoted by Cosimo de’ Medici, according to which ancient wisdom partook of that prisca theologia fully inspired and ultimately fulfilled by Christian revelation.60 Thanks to this profound, providentially guaranteed convergence, even the extraordinary novelty of the rebirth of classical antiquity could be interpreted as a liberating refraction of the very Christian salvific mystery itself, bringing new life, light, spirituality, and an exaltation of the dignity of humankind and of its vocation to the divine.61

Cultural excellence and far-sighted personal promotion, therefore, converge in the ambitious choice of the centaur as a Medici symbol and as an emblem of Florentine humanistic-Renaissance culture. As Augustine had argued in De moribus,62 the image of the centaur can be linked to that of the winged chariot,63 central to the Neoplatonic speculations that, gravitating around Ficino, the “court philosopher,”64 animated Medici cultural circles. I would also point to another work now finally attributed to Bertoldo di Giovanni, Donatello’s principal collaborator and the probable author of the frieze with the centaurs on the two pulpits of San Lorenzo. I refer to the splendid bust of a young philosopher (Figure 6) represented as “Phaedrus,” the young and beautiful disciple of Plato’s Socrates, who bears on his chest a medallion depicting the winged chariot of the Phaedrus. The youth has been identified as Giovanni di Niccolò Cavalcanti,65 an intimate of Marsilio Ficino and one of the first protagonists of his Libro dell’amore, in which a fundamental interpretation of the most famous myth of the Phaedrus recurs.66

In his Lettera a Giovanni Cavalcanti amico unico,67 in dedicating the treatise to Cavalcanti, Marsilio Ficino insists on the ambiguous nature of the soul, capable either of becoming divine or of descending into bestiality, concluding:

Sciocco adunque e misero si ha da tenere colui che essendo da Iddio alle cose alte e degne allettato è provocato per mezzo del senso del vedere. Nondimeno egli volendo più tosto adoperare il tatto si lascia nel lotto sommergere, e similmente mal fa quello, che potendo d’huomo farsi Iddio, contemplando per mezo de l’humana, la bellezza divina; con tutto ciò egli più tosto d’huomo diventa bestia, proponendo la bellezza corporea e vana, a una spirituale e vera.68

It is thus understandable how the image of Chiron may represent the virtuous dynamism of the soul, which, by mastering its bestial appetites, proves capable of becoming wise and of attaining divinization. Exemplary in this regard is the interpretation of Chiron already proposed by Salutati;69 equally notable is its affinity with the Pichian restitution of man as a “chameleon,” becoming whatever his free will chooses him to be, mutating in form. For Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, indeed, homo is a “variae ac multiformis et desultoriae naturae animal,” an ambiguous subject who in his spiritus “tam distantes naturae invicem copulat;”70 yet precisely because he is free, he is also dynamic. He is called by God the creator to subdue the animal part—likened to a mare, under the influence of Psalm 48 and Jeremiah 5:8—71 thus to make it die or sacrifice it, in order to ascend to the hyperuranium, even to the mystical fusion of his higher component, the soul, with the divine One.72 The correspondence with the personal ascending dynamic of the centaur Chiron, culminating in his catasterism, is perfect.

The theme of mastering the appetitive and volitional component of the soul, governed by the mens capable of understanding the divine, and thus the proper orientation of the frenzy of love, therefore links both the image of the winged chariot virtuously restored to its celestial dimension (the bust of the young Platonist) and the image of Chiron as a wise, illuminating centaur (the tondo of Palazzo Medici). Not by chance, both were produced by a single artist, the greatest continuator of Donatello’s art.

In this sense, a bronze plaquette (Figure 7) from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, almost certainly of Florentine origin, may also be significant: it depicts Thetis entrusting Achilles to Chiron. The theme of Chiron’s education—his capacity to tame the irrational component and ennoble man by orienting him toward celestial wisdom—may acquire prominence precisely in relation to the Ficinian Neoplatonism promoted in Florence by Cosimo.73

The figure of Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici Bank from 1463 to 1490 under Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo il Magnifico, likewise attests to the pervasiveness of the image of the virtuous centaur, which he adopted as the emblem of his own family, certainly also in homage to the Medici, lords of Florence and arbiters of his financial fortune. This is confirmed by several illuminated manuscripts he commissioned, adorned with centaurs. Particularly significant, in the family chapel in Santa Trinita, are the frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1482–1485) and the tombs of Sassetti and his wife Nera Corsi, attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo. Here—analogous to the columned courtyard of Palazzo Medici—the image of the centaur (repeatedly present) coexists with that of David, slayer of Goliath and prince of Christian peace, both in reference to the stone, emblem of the Sassetti family, hurled by David as savior of the patria, and in homage to the Medici lineage.

It is worth recalling that Sassetti’s iconographic choices form the subject of one of the key essays by Aby Warburg, in which the image of the centaur assumes a central role.74 Indeed, Chiron, in his eruption from classical antiquity into the heart of the Florentine Renaissance, visually recapitulates Warburg’s well-known motto “per monstra ad sphaeram.” The exemplary Pathosformel of the wise centaur—an immortal who chooses death because of excessive suffering, yet ultimately ascends to heaven—perfectly expresses the “enlightened” dynamism that characterizes Warburg’s interpretation of the Renaissance as the Christian revivification of classical antiquity, and thus his iconology as the organ of a new science of culture.75 In Chiron lies the symbol of the exit from primordial chaos (always latent, threatening, and recurrent), through the emergence of reason (always precarious and reversible), toward the rational knowledge of the stars.

It should be remembered that the motto “per monstra ad sphaeram” guides and concludes a key text of Warburg’s later years, the long commemoration of his friend Franz Boll, philologist and scholar of classical and late-antique astrological texts,76 delivered on 25 April 1925 at the Warburg Library in Hamburg: Die Einwirkung der “Sphaera barbarica.”77 From the perspective of the expulsion of the triumphant beast (and Giordano Bruno is an author repeatedly invoked by Warburg), the restoration of Greek rationality was reflected in the supreme image of harmonious celestial order, opposed to the magical and late-antique astrological doctrines that—distorted by irrationalistic Eastern influences—assigned monstrous and animal names to the stars. For Warburg, the Renaissance opened a true Aufklärung, interpreted as an effort to restore the classical age, a renewed access to the transfiguring light of ancient forms finally freed from the Oriental enchantment.78 In his pseudo-Nietzschean perspective (for him, the Dionysian is only the dark ground from which one must emerge), Warburg attributes to the power of Mnemosyne—that is, cultural memory—the reassertion of reason struggling against the monstrous violence of the irrational, which is to be tamed and converted. This, for him, was the lofty ideal of the new Apollonian art of the Italian Quattrocento, culminating in the work of Sandro Botticelli and finding, a few decades later, its heir and perfecter in Raphael. The power of Mnemosyne is thus affirmed as a living, creative act—always restless, because never definitively accomplished—of distancing, liberation, and full rational transfiguration of the human, within which the power of the Dionysian nonetheless persists and resists, the primordial mythical darkness as a veritable “voragine del senso, luogo del suo stesso mancamento.”79 For Warburg, it is precisely in the goddess Athena/Pallas—both in Botticelli’s centaur-taming figure and in the Raphaelesque deity guaranteeing the rational order of the universe in the School of Athens—that the Renaissance finds its highest and most significant symbol.80

Returning to the symbolic universe chosen by Sassetti, Warburg himself notes the presence of two chironized centaurs—graceful though still armed with sling and stones—adorning the illuminated manuscript of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics translated into Latin by Johannes Argyropoulos (Figure 8). They support the family device, bearing stones and a sling.81

The recurrence of the centaur device—monsters of dual nature in which power is converted into wisdom—reveals how, even iconographically, the financier Sassetti positioned himself within the Medici orbit: financiers, cultural patrons, promoters of Platonism, and, under Cosimo, even protectors of the pope and of the council (1439), which, transferred to Florence, achieved the ephemeral union with Eastern Christianity. Accumulation of wealth, promotion of cutting-edge culture, artistic patronage, and religious piety all served to nourish and sublimate the unbridled political ambitions of the new rulers of Florence, intent on ennobling their hegemony as a government of divinizing wisdom: the reasons of the soul were also political reasons, and Platonic metaphysics was in any case functional to justify an ideology of princely domination.

4. Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur

The virtuous harmony between martial male desire and the higher, redemptive wisdom of love is the central iconographic theme of Botticelli’s painting Pallas and the Centaur:82 Pallas—referring to the Medici heraldic symbol of the balls, palle—that is, the wise goddess Minerva (perhaps representing Lorenzo il Magnifico?) adorned with olive and bearing on her robe a Medici emblem (interlaced rings set with diamonds),83 tames the mythological sagittary (Ferrante, King of Naples? Pope Sixtus IV, enemy of the Medici? The war that drenched Italy in blood after the Pazzi conspiracy?), a symbol of libido dominandi and impious violence, yet transformed into the “human” Chiron, while Naples appears in the background, marking the destination of Lorenzo’s daring but ultimately successful journey in 1478–1479 to secure peace with King Ferrante.84

If the identification of the centaur with the violent, murderous Pope Sixtus IV—the instigator of the Pazzi conspiracy—were accepted, Botticelli’s image would acquire particular significance. It would represent the “dual” nature of the pontiff, vicar of Christ, both man and God, as a tyrannical parody of the “man-beast,” yet ultimately tamed by the superior wisdom of Lorenzo, depicted as Pallas in his Medici robe. Of course, it must be noted that the painting was executed by Botticelli upon returning from Rome, where Sixtus IV had commissioned him to paint three biblical scenes on the lateral walls of the Sistine Chapel. The shift from papal patronage to such a controversial figure in relation to the pontiff seems challenging.

Gombrich’s Neoplatonic interpretation must also be considered. He is skeptical of a political reading of the painting, seeing it instead as dependent on Ficino’s exaltation of Pallas as the image of celestial philosophical wisdom, capable of governing lower desires and converting the intellect to transcendent truths.85 However, this cannot be regarded as the exclusive interpretation. The centaur’s sorrowful expression, reminiscent of a Christus patiens, and the melancholic sweetness of Pallas’ gaze86 recall another Botticelli painting from a few years earlier, Venus and Mars (Figure 9). In it, some fauns—mythical creatures comparable to centaurs—play with Mars’ weapons, which bear the features of Giuliano, seemingly transforming or ‘converting’ the lethal spear into Venus’ sacred shell, while the goddess contemplates her lover. Through the shell, a faun appears to breathe life into the sleeping Giuliano, in the guise of a deposed Christ. The painting thus suggests a dynamic of Medicean catasterism, overseen by Venus,87 goddess of amorous wisdom. The tragic memory of Giuliano, the ‘martyr’ hero sacrificed (with a symbolic iron resting precariously in his hand), becomes a sacred celebration of the power of the Messianic family, perpetually renewed under divine protection88—like Lorenzo’s laurel tree, which flourishes again when cut. Les Tem(p)s Revient: Laurentius embodies the gold of rebirth, the Messianic miracle of resurrection, and the apotheosis of the Medici gens aurea,89 witnessed by the two centaurs that his grandfather Cosimo had wished to be represented on Donatello’s Pulpit:

Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;/iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto./Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum/desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,/casta, fave, Lucina: tuus iam regnat Apollo […] te duce. Si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri,/inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras./Ille deum vitam accipiet divisque videbit/permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis/pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.90

Indeed, the Florentine Neoplatonic flourishing promoted by the Medici, as well as their religious patronage, were always connected to a very lucid promotion of political hegemony. It therefore seems impossible not to recognize a political resonance also in Pallas and the Centaur. Even if intended for a strictly private use, it was nonetheless destined for a member of the family that ruled Florence (perhaps as a gift commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent for his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici on the occasion of his marriage to Semiramide Appiani in 1482).91 This family was systematically engaged in justifying and ‘sacralizing’, within both a Christian and classical framework, its own power, which in those very years was moreover subjected to a violent assault. Within Medicean ideological propaganda, the presence of the ‘pious’ centaur tamed and guided by an Athena at once armed and peaceful is well attested. The human, rational, and virtuous component of Chiron medicus—tutor of princes and heroes, musician capable of educating toward ethical and political harmony—is externalized and embodied by the goddess of wisdom and the arts, of just war that guarantees peace, whose garment, as noted, is decorated with Medicean symbols, particularly those of Lorenzo.92

The reference to Mars subdued by the love of the goddess Venus (or to the violent and furious Alexander the Great in a panel of Botticelli’s Calumny)93 is, in any case, also an ideological, truly ‘centaur-like’ (because double, equivocal!) apology of the Medici as a family opposed to the impious tyranny threatening Florence (one may think of Sixtus IV and the Pazzi conspiracy), from which the Davidic—hence messianic—lineage descending from Cosimo protects its homeland while assuming lordship over it.94 The theme of the centaur or of Mars subdued by Pallas/Venus or by her satyrs/cupids also appears in Botticelli’s Calumny, particularly on the architrave of the loggia see (Figure 10 and Figure 11), where recurring Medicean ideological codes resurface, conveying meanings that are not only ethical but also political.95 Love both frees and controls; it is gentle and fierce simultaneously; it does not extinguish libido but transforms it into more noble desires.

Not by chance, Giovanni de’ Medici—future Leo X—after restoring his family’s hegemony in Florence, chose as his motto an evangelical phrase: “iugum meum suave est, et onus meum leve.”96 In reality, the centaur-pope, at once gentle and ruthless, merciful and deceptive, interpreted this sweet evangelical yoke also as a shrewd and forceful political program of temporal assertion. To accomplish it, he would again have recourse to Mars, ‘lance at the ready’. The erotic and tyrannical impulse of the centaur, in being sublimated, passes over into—and continues to throb within—the same gentle and sapient hegemony of Venus/Pallas, which, after subduing Florence, would also subdue Rome.

Likewise, the act of seizing by the hair—by Pallas/Venus or her cupids—as a sign of domination over the centaur (and over Mars himself, who embodies its warlike and sanguinary aspects) symbolically recalls the distinctly Renaissance, and specifically Machiavellian, metaphor of the virtuous man capable of grasping Fortune and subduing her, then striking and battering her as recommended in chapter XXV of The Prince and echoed in the rhyme Descriptio Occasionis (1517–1526), dependent on an epigram by Ausonius.97 In the De Fortuna Capitolum (1506?), in particular, the virtuous act is rendered as a form of preventive violence capable of extinguishing and subduing Fortune’s destructive power, which Chapter XXV compares to the devastating flood of a river without banks:

Temer, Giovambatista, tu non puoi/né debbi in alcun modo aver paura/d’altre ferite che de colpi suoi,/perché questa volubil creatura/spesso si suol oppor con maggior forza/dove più forza vede aver Natura;/suo natural potenzia ogni uomo sforza,/e ’l regno suo sempre è violento,/se virtù eccessiva non l’ammorza.98

It is a violent act, hence an eminently centauric one, that claims to subdue, by seizing it by the hair, whatever resists the human desire for hegemony: whether it be the act of reason seeking to dominate the body, or the act of the libido dominandi forcing itself upon fortune, as upon every form of reason.

The theme is central in the later work of Aby Warburg, who addresses it by linking Machiavelli’s Occasione with a medal (Figure 12) datable to around 1585 bearing the emblem chosen by Camillo Agrippa, a polymath, engineer, and architect active in Rome from 1535 onward and author, among other works, of La virtù (1598), a Trattato di scientia d’arme (1568), and a Dialogo sopra la generatione dei venti (1584).99 Commenting on the image on this medal, Warburg contrasts the eminently human act of begreifen—to comprehend—with the demonic and bestial act of wanting to greifen, to seize or grasp.100 Consequently, he condemns, as a symbol of “brutale, insensata stoltezza” and of spiritual regression, the distinctly Renaissance image of the virtuous, warlike man who seeks to become master of his destiny by grasping Fortune by the hair and violently restraining her. It is worth recalling that Adriano Sofri has already emphasized the significance of Warburg’s discussion of Agrippa’s medal,101 interpreting the scene of the virtuous domination of Fortune described in Chapter XXVI of The Prince as a veritable rape, and as the virtuous counter-image of another rape—the one suffered by Italy, a woman “beaten, stripped, torn, overrun” by barbarians.102 Commenting on this “immagine aggressiva dell’assalitore,” Warburg himself had already identified the source of Agrippa’s medal and motto: “Velis nolisve. Un papa ha in tal modo caratterizzato l’archetipo del condottiero (Alfonso)”103 The pope in question was Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini), who, before ascending to the papal throne, in his Somnium de Fortuna exalted Alfonso V of Aragon, the Magnanimous, as a virtuous hero capable of subduing Fortune after the terrible reversals to which she had subjected him—one may think of the defeat of Ponza, when he and his brothers were taken prisoner by the Genoese. With implacable determination, Alfonso had ‘pursued’ Fortune and, once he had seized her by the hair, made her his by force, willing or unwilling, until, in 1443, he became rex utriusque Siciliae.

This stigmatization of virtue as that which grasps and dominates fortune, succeeding in subordinating to its own helm the sail of Fortune exposed to the contingency of the winds, undermines the very ideal image of the Renaissance proposed by Warburg, all the more so if it is plausible, as has been suggested, that the armed figure seizing Fortune on Agrippa’s medal is Minerva herself.104 Does Pallas not grasp the centaur by the hair, subduing him with irresistible force? Does Venus not subjugate and exhaust the violence of Mars with inexorable bonds? Does not Warburg’s interpretation of the Renaissance as an ideal, Apollonian distancing from the Dionysian brutality of the monstrum—half man and half animal—or of Mars, god of war, subdued by Pallas/Venus, short-circuit precisely here, in relation to the subjugation of the centaur? And does not the figure of the rapacious centaur—Ixion attempting to violate Hera, Eurytus attempting to violate Hippodamia and unleashing the centauromachy, Nessus attempting to violate Deianira—end up invading and possessing that of Pallas and Venus themselves, in their very act of violently subjugating furious irrationality (the reasonless contingency of Fortune, the untamable anarchy of desire) that exceeds them?

It would seem, then, that Warburg’s spiritualistic and Enlightened perspective reaches a crisis point at the moment of the centaur’s equivocal subjugation, restoring the historical task of memory as a dramatic and never-resolved conflict.105 All the more so since the humanistic-Renaissance image of Reason, Justice, and celestial Love capable of subduing the centaur of desire, violence, and social discord has, in its original historical context, an evident ideological and eminently political function: it conveys a hidden truth, a will to hegemony—if not to tyranny—and thus an irreducible libido dominandi. The concupiscent and profoundly political Machiavellian centaur thus seems to slip free from the “spiritual” grasp of Pallas.

5. Giuliano De’ Medici as a Centaur in Poliziano’s Stanze per la Giostra

As is well known, Botticelli’s painting shows a remarkable correspondence with the Stanze per la giostra by Angelo Poliziano,106 originally composed as an encomium of the valiant Giuliano de’ Medici, victor in a chivalric tournament organized in Florence by his brother Lorenzo the Magnificent to mark his entry into active political life. The tournament has generally been identified with the one held on 29 January 1475, which was intended to be renewed in a new tournament planned for 1478, aimed at exalting Medicean principles, but which never took place because of the Pazzi Conspiracy. Indeed, on 26 April, the Magnificent’s brother was assassinated, one month before the birth of his illegitimate son, the future Clement VII. The Stanze, revised after Giuliano’s murder yet left unfinished at Poliziano’s death in 1494,107 are to be interpreted as a book, both encomiastic and tragic (especially in the chronologically later section)108, of erotic-political-theological metamorphoses, intended to celebrate the Medici family struck down yet capable of rising again. In it, the image of the centaur recurs, referring to Giuliano:

Quale il centaur per la nevosa selva/di Pelio o d’Emo va feroce in caccia,/dalle lor tane predando ogni belva,/or l’orso uccide, or al lion minaccia./Quanto è più ardita fera, più s’inselva,/e ’l sangue a tutte dentro al cor s’agghiaccia;/la selva trema e gli cede ogni pianta,/li arbori abbatte o sveglie, o’ rami schianta.109

This recurrence of the centaur might be interpreted as an external, conventional analogy,110 used to portray Giuliano as an irresistible hunter. Yet, as already suggested by Hermann Ulmann, it carries a notable symbolic weight111 and is continually taken up again. The celebrated victor of the joust is, in fact, a splendid centaur, and as such he is sung throughout the first section of the Stanze: cold and fierce, inseparable from his horse and seized by the very frenzy of the hunt, a distinctive trait of centaurs.112 Considering the systematic Platonizing allegory that characterizes Poliziano’s work and the entire Medicean cultural context, the Giuliano–horse pairing represents the volitional element of the soul, not yet visited by the wound of love and the vision of beauty, identifiable with Simonetta Vespucci, the erotic image of the celestial Minerva/Venus.

In this respect, it is worth noting that at the victorious joust of 1475 Giuliano de’ Medici displayed a banner designed by Botticelli, depicting Pallas Athena ‘disarming’ Cupid of his bow, quiver, and now-broken arrows.113 Evidently, the connection of the tournament knight with the wise goddess armed for victorious peace anticipated the subject of the painting Pallas and the Centaur mentioned above, presenting an encomiastic emblem traditionally referred to a Medici prince: a fierce, armed centaur governed by Wisdom, inspirer of lofty civil and spiritual deeds. The Stanze—even defined as a didactic illustration of the iconographic program of Giuliano’s device114—dramatize this courtly code, celebrating Giuliano’s courtly love for Simonetta Cattanei Vespucci, who becomes both image and instrument of Athena. From a wild predator, almost a new Hippolytus, proud and indifferent to erotic passion, Giuliano undergoes a first erotic metamorphosis, effected by Cupid, who captures him by making him behold an unattainable white hind, which he pursues in vain. The Petrarchan image represents the concupiscent desire for the woman, from whom she (married and virtuous) withdraws. The hind, in fact, transforms into a marvelous nymph, with whom the centaur Giuliano falls hopelessly in love:115 she is identified with Simonetta Vespucci, at once desired and, at least within the conventions of courtly love, unattainable. The hunter becomes the prey of his own prey, captured by her elusive perfection, which draws him out of himself. Giuliano becomes wholly Love,116 but the beloved woman (unreachable not only because she is a virtuous wife, but also because she is later seized by death) is transfigured into a divine woman, who

Sembra Talia, se in man prende la cetra,/sembra Minerva se in man prende l’asta;/se l’arco ha in mano, al fianco la faretra,/giurar potrai che sia Dïana casta.117

The centaur’s dual nature thus marks the ascending process of desire: from its feral animality, through erotic passion transfigured into civic passion, up to the purely spiritual dimension. The conclusion of the Stanze therefore celebrates Giuliano as a tamed centaur, a virtuous prince who, now possessed by Love, is first conquered by eros and then becomes capable of transfiguring it. With Ficino as interpreter of Plato’s Symposium and of its opposition between Venus Pandemos and Venus Urania,118 Giuliano, after suffering the wound of love and with Simonetta—figured as Pallas—having disarmed and bound Cupid, ultimately transforms his sensual concupiscence into a ‘celestial’ desire, which bears the highest political value and imperishable glory.119

This means that Pallas and Venus ultimately come to be identified,120 as demonstrated by a woodcut from the first fifteen years of the sixteenth century that accompanied a printed edition of the Stanze (Figure 13), in which Giuliano, kneeling, sacrifices before the altar of (Venus) Cytherea/Cytharea121—upon which the Medici emblems burn without being consumed—at the feet of a statue of Minerva.

Celestial Love is thus represented by Minerva/Pallas with a spear or staff, a symbol of peaceful and rational power, capable of directing, taming, and converting the furious libido of the centaur Giuliano. Thus, at the end of his earthly adventure, invoking Minerva, Glory, and Love, Giuliano, in a dream, dons the very armor of Pallas, previously worn by Simonetta; and, having become a centaur inflamed by political and celestial Glory, he is significantly compared to a horse excited by battle.122 Exalted by Poetry as triumphant in History,123 he is thereby able to accomplish his heroic apotheosis:

Con voi men vengo, Amor, Minerva e Gloria,/ché ’l vostro foco tutto ’l cor m’avvampa:/da voi spero acquistar l’alta vittoria,/che tutto acceso son di vostra lampa./Datemi aita sì che ogni memoria/segnar si possa di mia eterna stampa,/e facci umil colei ch’or ne disdegna:/ch’i’ porterò di voi nel campo insegna.124

Giuliano’s desire for love and glory, tragically thwarted by his assassination during the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, is celebrated by Poliziano, in his revision of the Stanze, as the apotheosis of Iulio125 and as the triumph, which is yet to come, of the ‘Chironic’ Medici family, capable of rising to eternal memory in a kind of political catasterism. This trajectory would in fact reach its sacred culmination with the elevation of two Medici scions to the papacy. Machiavelli would extol it at the end of the Florentine Histories, when he identified in the creation of Giovanni de’ Medici as cardinal the political masterpiece of the “centaur” Lorenzo the Magnificent—at once erotic and wise—capable of raising his lineage to the heavens.

6. The Medicean Centaur Within the Ceremonial Apparatus of Leo X’s Papal Coronation

Only the courtly circulation of the Chironic code can explain the reappearance of the Medicean centaur in Rome within the scenography of the triumphal procession celebrating the coronation of Leo X,126 particularly in the installation erected before “la Casa” of Agostino Chigi. As Giovanni Giacomo Penni testifies in his Chronica (1513), at the center of a stage surmounted by a triumphal arch there had been placed the statue of a lion (the name of the Florentine pope) and four statues set at its four corners: (a) Saturn (in the form of a man with serpent and hourglass), indicating the return of the aurea aetas; (b) Apollo, god of the arts restored by the Medici pope, but also the divinity invoked by Virgil in the Fourth Eclogue—traditionally interpreted as a figure of the coming Christ and restorer of the Saturnian Golden Age—encomiastically realized by Leo X; (c) Mercury, god of commerce and the classical alter ego of David the beheader, whom the Medici had chosen as their symbol; (d) finally, a centaur—certainly the wise Chiron, son of Saturn, first medicus and educator of princes—who evidently signified Leo X and his family. This celebratory apparatus was completed by the image and insignia of the pope, beside the lion at the center of the scene, who assumed the role of Moses as “physician and healer,”127 savior of a Woman (symbol of the Church and of Italy) assaulted by serpents.128

Moreover, above the stage, there was a decorative band on which were inscribed

due versi a lettere d’oro di tal tenore OLIM. HABVIT. CYPRIS. SVA. TEMPORA. TEMPORA. MAVORS/OLIM. HABVIT. SVA. NUNC. TEMPORA. PALLAS. HABET

The traditional encomiastic celebration of the transition from the Iron Age to the peaceful Golden Age—which had already dominated the Florentine carnival of 1513, with the Medici restored and Leo X’s papal election still to come129—is here modulated by first referring to the ages of Venus and of Mars, obviously connected by an erotic relationship, and then to the advent of the age of Pallas. The simultaneous presence of the statue of a centaur—clearly Chiron the physician, placed beside his father Saturn and the god Apollo, father of Asclepius, Chiron’s pupil and god of medicine—reactualizes the encomiastic Medici ideology sung by Poliziano130 and given visual form by Botticelli. The new pontiff is the medicus who tames Mars (who however is always ready to be reawakened) and realizes the divine, golden dominion of Venus/Pallas. Medicean Florence conquers Rome and eternalizes itself. The papal triumph of Leo X, the new Moses as physician and healer, reworks—exalting it within a fully theological dimension—the mythologizing celebration of the Laurentian regime, which had passed through the terrible crisis of the Pazzi conspiracy embodied by Giuliano, the sacrificial prince divinized in the form of a love-struck, catasterized centaur.

7. The Medicean Centaur as a Commonplace of Curial Encomiastic Literature

That the centaur medicus had become a recognized emblem of the Medici—restored to power in Florence and raised to the papacy with Leo X in 1513—is confirmed by the explicit identification of the family with the “divinized” centaur Chiron in an anonymous burlesque commentary produced in Rome within the circle of Leonine humanists. A group of curial literati and academicians, with Bembo at their head and, among others, Agostino Nifo, later the normalizing “interpreter” of Machiavelli’s Prince, translated into Latin, critically reassembled and ethically “corrected” in his De regnandi peritia (1523),131 set themselves to gloss sarcastically the Epulum populi Romani of the obscure Giulio Simone Siculo, a blatantly courtly poem (much appreciated by Leo X) that rendered in awkwardly encomiastic verse the chronicle of the festivities celebrated during the granting of Roman citizenship to Giuliano de’ Medici in September 1513.132

I limit myself to reporting excerpts from two lines (which I mark in quotation marks) from the opening of the Epulum and the learned, derisive commentaries attributed to Paolo Giovio and Lorenzo Crasso, an academic about whom no information has survived:

“Medici deique Tonantis.” Iovem dicit, et Apollinem cuius inventum medicina putatur. Vel denique Chironem, qui. “Feci ubi civem summum.” Id civem civitate caelitum, quod ait Plautus, quid enim Caelo sublimius? Ergo sensus hic est, postquam ipsum Chironem in deorum numerum recepit. Videtur itaque de Chirone particulariter intellexisse. Sed melius est, prudentia sua lector intelligat de Iuliano Medice, quem Urbe Roma donatum videtur Poeta voluisse canere. Laurentius Crassus.133

The overlap between the Medici and Chiron, the ‘inventor’ of pharmacology, is first of all referred to the pope, also encomiastically designated as Jupiter, holder of supreme divine power, and Apollo, the divine sun who inspires and illuminates the arts, among them medicine, whose ‘invention’ he shares with Chiron. The commentator Paolo Giovio, at once humanist and physician, displays toward the son of Saturn a learned, demythologizing, and ‘professional’ interest, drawn “ex barbara historia,” which cannot be reconstructed but attests to the importance of the figure in the curial context. The encomiastic epithet of Chiron, catasterized for his wisdom and justice, is nevertheless also applied to Giuliano di Lorenzo, the ‘divinized’ centaur made into a new secular “prince” of Rome. In short, among the Medicean court literati, an identity emblem circulated as a true commonplace, imported from Florence into the papal Urbs. It resonates clearly with the posthumous apotheosis of Giuliano di Piero proposed in Poliziano’s Stanze, as well as with the contemporary presentation of the centaur prince, referred exemplarily to the Pope, in the treatise that Machiavelli in December 1513 intended to dedicate to the brother of Leo X and later dedicated to their nephew Lorenzo. In The Prince, in fact, one witnesses the shift of the image of the centaur Chiron from a pontiff (explicitly Alexander VI, implicitly Leo X) to his secular princely offspring.

8. Moses as “Centaur” as a Papal Figure in Tommaso Sardi’s Anima Peregrina

For encomiastic reasons, the figure of the centaur plays a notable symbolic role in the Anima peregrina of the Florentine Dominican Tommaso Sardi,134 who was, among other things, in direct and close contact with Machiavelli.135 This eminently theological-political poem, which sought to reactualize Dante’s Commedia and whose layered composition extended over many years, is accompanied by an extensive prose commentary and was conceived as an exaltation of the pope and reigning princes: first Alexander VI and the Valentino, then Julius II and Pier Soderini in 1511, and finally Leo X, to whom it was dedicated and delivered in October 1515. In its final redaction, the Dominican, dominated by an overtly courtly intention, claimed to have prophesied the election of Giovanni de’ Medici to the papacy. Sardi presents an explicit symbolic identification between the centaur and Moses, who, in the poem, assumes the role of guide up to the threshold of paradise, a role performed by Virgil in Dante’s Commedia. Thus, to Sardi’s soul, which begins its pilgrimage that will culminate poetically and mystically in the theophanic vision of the Medicean papal flower/laurel, Moses appears bent over the “holy stone” of the Tablets of the Law, yet in the appearance of a centaur:

Se tu vuoi côr el fior del verde lauro,/seghuirai l’onbra veste el sancto sasso./Rivolto viddi et parvemi un centhauro/ch ’l passo vagheggiava della china/splendente come in ciel cornuto thauro./Così come io credetti onbra divina,/lo scorger non la giunse qual quel fussi/ché luce in maggior luce s’abbacìna.

This is the commentary:

El nostro auctore in prima faccia non conobbe Moyses essere forma humana ma cosa mostruosa, però dixe et paruemi uno centhauro. Tu hai ad notare che el centhauro è mezo cavallo et mezo huomo, et secondo le favole poetiche mezo huomo et mezo thoro et sono chiamati monocenthauri, de’ quali Ovidio “semibouemque uirum semiuirumque bouem […] Et meritamente el poeta presente finge gli paressi uno centhauro, ché veramente Moyses fu fortissimo et di animo et di corpo et terribile nelle executioni hebbe a ffare per li comandamenti de Dio, et quasi se gli poteva dare questo congnome perché haveva la virtù del cavallo et dello huomo che sì chome nelle battalglie principalmente bisongna gente d’arme et maxime poi uno capitano bene admaestrato con fortissimo cavallo, chosì Moyses, capitano del popolo di Dio contro a pharaone, era fortissimo et celeratissimo chome uno uccello o vento ad la obbedientia di Dio […] perché Moyses fu huomo divino in segno che lui parlò a Dio a faccia a faccia, et come cosa divina volle Dio darli le Leggie che per lui si manifestassino al popolo suo.136

The image of the centaur is thus interpreted as primarily martial. First, the traditional depiction of the centaurs’ concupiscent nature is emphasized, though now given a political inflection. This derives from Ixion’s desire to unite sexually with Juno, the “dea de’ reami.” Jupiter, mocking him, makes him couple with an “ymagine di nebbia ad la similitudine di Iunone,” from which are born the “centhauri monstri fortissimi.”137 Of particular interest, however, is the renewed rationalizing interpretation of the myth. It is explained in relation to the perverse earthly pursuit of absolute power.138 Ixion, progenitor of the centaurs, would in fact have been the first prince to assemble an army of mounted warriors in order to seize tyranny. Behind his features, through a Dantean reminiscence, the figure of the Valentino thus seems to emerge. Above all, Sardi connects the image of the centaur to the ‘equivocal’ nature of Moses’ power. Moses appears as a truly armed prophet,139 at once sacral and temporal. He speaks with God, yet also wages war valiantly against the Egyptians. The centaur’s ambiguous symbolism reaches its highest significance. It functions as a courtly tribute, first to the Borgia family and later to the Medici, both characterized by the pursuit of principate through violence and deception, on the model of the Valentino and Alexander VI. At the same time, through the figural identification of the man-horse with Moses, the centaur becomes a symbol of papal authority, since the giver of the Hebrew Law was universally recognized as a biblical type of the pope. Finally, Moses-centaur even appears as an “ombra divina,” a higher light revealed in “forma humana.” In this way, he prefigures the mystery of Christ’s incarnation and attests to the paradoxical symbolic kinship between the Redeemer’s dual nature and that of the man-beast, both wondrous in exceeding the merely human. Precisely because he can figure the Christological mystery, Moses-centaur also becomes typus papae,140 a figure of the vicar of Christ and the theological-political summit of the divine order.

It therefore becomes clear why Lutheran propaganda, intent on denouncing the antichristian nature of the Roman pope, repeatedly invoked a monstrous anthropo-zoomorphic figure identified as the Bapstesel, the pope-ass (Figure 14). This figure represents a demonic metamorphosis of the pontifical centaur’s perverse ambiguity. Lucas Cranach devised it by drawing on reports of a famous monster discovered in Rome near the Tiber in January 1496, which the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Zorzi had described in strikingly surreal terms.141

9. The Centaur of Mandragola: Callimaco as a Papal Figure

The first publication of the text of La mandragola is a poor-quality print (Florentine or Sienese), anonymous and lacking any indication of year, place, or printer, entitled Comedia di Callimaco: & di Lucretia and known as the “centaur edition” in reference to the image on its title page (Figure 15).142 It depicts Chiron as a physician—identifiable by the medicinal, mandrake-like herbs hanging at his side—and a musician,143 intent on playing a lira da braccio; at the same time, the presence of the bow confirms his centaurian nature, that is, his violent and sensual character, the very nature of a princely and daring archer. At the centre of the frieze, moreover, one can clearly see a tondo with six dots, which Ridolfi has identified as an homage to the six Medicean balls.144

I find Ridolfi’s interpretation—also accepted by Inglese145 against Stoppelli’s skepticism146—entirely convincing, and I wonder whether the balls or bezants might also be echoed, albeit asymmetrically, in the crude depiction of the five pegs or knobs and in the curl of the instrument. In this regard, I would stress a detail that is generally overlooked yet can resonate significantly with the Medicean instrument held by the centaur. In the text of the Mandragola there recurs no fewer than six times an explicit reference to Callimaco’s “lute” as a musician147—an insistence that is overly pronounced and narratively unnecessary to be purely accidental. Beyond the possible sexual symbolism of the lute, attested for example in Aretino,148 the reference to Leo X seems certain: the musical pope, a lover of music and himself quite refined lutenist, composer of sacred and secular works,149 and an exceptionally generous patron who summoned to Rome the greatest lutenists of the age.150

But why does the print show a centaur as its image, when the comedy never mentions one? Since it is not literarily descriptive, the image of the centaur cannot but possess symbolic value, alluding both to the deeper meaning of the comedy and to its ultimate addressee. Here, it helps that we have documented the widespread attestation of Chiron as a Medicean symbol, even as a Mosaic-Christological papal emblem, as shown not only by Sardi’s poem but also by the exemplary “incarnation” of Chiron in Alexander VI presented in The Prince, chapter XVIII. In the case of the Mandragola, therefore, I argue that the Chiron on the title page of the first printed edition of the comedy (1) clearly alludes to Callimaco—the “fair combatant,” erotic warrior, physician, and musician (when disguised as a “garzonaccio”); and (2) should be recognised as an encomiastic and at the same time protreptic figure of Leo X, to whom chapter XVIII of The Prince was itself directed. This entails attributing to Machiavelli the decision to recapitulate the plot of the comedy in the image of the centaur.151 It is indeed highly unlikely that the printing of the comedy would have been undertaken without Machiavelli’s consent, if not on his direct initiative. Consequently, the presence on the title page of a medical, musical, erotic, wise yet martial centaur (the educator of Achilles!) provides the allegorical key to the drama and confirms its connection with the most subversive content of The Prince:152 the exaltation, in chapter XVIII, of the human-bestial centaur (lion-like and fox-like) embodied by Alexander VI, exemplary armed Moses-prophet, to whom Leo X is urged to conform by promoting a new secular Medici prince modelled on the Valentino.153

Elsewhere, I have advanced a systematically allegorical reading of the Mandragola that identifies Callimaco as a figure of Leo X.154 Indeed, if the text of the comedy was substantially fixed in 1519–1520 (the date of the Redi manuscript) and the printing of the Comedia del centauro cannot be dated earlier than 1520 (the year of the attested Florentine and Roman performances) or at the latest 1525 (the Venetian performance), it was in any case circulated after Lorenzo de’ Medici Jr. had already died. The symbolic bridegroom of Lucrezia—this most virtuous wife “violated” by deception and subdued by erotic force, thus a symbol of Rome even more than of Florence—cannot therefore be the son of Piero the Fatuous, but rather the reigning pope, before whom the comedy was performed in the Vatican in 1520, not far from the Sistine Chapel. This is attested by Battista della Palla in his letter to Machiavelli of 26 April 1520,155 and by Giovio in his Elogia.156 The performance most probably took place on 27 September, the feast day of the physician saints Cosmas and Damian, patrons of the Medici family.157 Consequently, Leo X must be recognized as the final and principal addressee of the Mandragola, the figure in relation to whom this text could not but be ‘employed’, assuming its definitive form and its most urgent relevance.

A valuable observation by Pasquale Stoppelli should therefore be pursued: “In nessun’altra commedia l’intreccio di sacro e profano è più sostanziale.”158 This, however, requires qualification. Machiavelli’s intention—he who had the honour of seeing his comedy performed before the pope in the Vatican thanks to Cardinal Giovanni Salviati’s intercession—cannot have been blasphemous or sarcastic toward Catholic liturgy, nor offensive toward the supreme Christian authority before whom the play was staged. Rather, it is centaur-like, double, paradoxically scandalous yet celebratory of Leo X. By turning the page, it shifts the letter of the comedy from the erotic, lascivious, and light plane to the sacred, grand, and grave one, transforming a Boccaccian adventure into an encomiastic metaphor of the power of Medicean papal authority. In this sense, the epilogue performs the symbolic reversal of Machiavelli’s lament in the Prologue: irresistibly drawn to lofty political matter yet forced into comic territory, the former secretary turned playwright cannot but don again his “curial garments,” converting what is “leggero e vano” into what is “saggio e grave.” This is the deep theological-political meaning of the comedy, which seeks to exhort the pope to “mostrar con altre imprese altra virtue.159”

Precisely because Leo X is the gravitational center of the fable, from its very title, specified in the Prologue, the Mandragola160 multiplies echoes of the Song of Songs, the biblical text which, by presenting with extraordinary realism the erotic games, acts, and pursuits of two lovers, already forced the Church Fathers into an extravagant allegorical interpretation. From this derived the traditional exaltation of Solomon as a figure of Christ, bridegroom of his Church, recapitulated in Mary, mother, woman, and daughter of Christ,161 of whom the pope was the sacred figure and earthly vicar. Similarly, the Song of Songs was often invoked to exalt the pope as the redeeming spouse of the Church and the militant redeemer-prince of Italy and Christendom in numerous encomiastic orations delivered at the Lateran Council, or in the famous Frottola pro papa Leone (1513) by the Savonarolan yet pro-Medicean Girolamo Benivieni.162 In short, just as only Christological allegory could justify the presence of an intensely erotic text such as the Song of Songs within the Bible, so only a courtly papal encomiastic symbolism, inspired by theological and liturgical codes, can explain the introduction of an erotically bold and morally dubious comedy into the Vatican and before the pope.163

One thus understands why, at the end of the comedy, Callimaco—disguised as a physician, with evident reference to the medicus Pope164—after his night of love with Lucrezia, defines himself as “più beato ch’e beati, più santo ch’e santi,”165 acquires “la chiave della camera terrena,”166 and—echoing both the biblical presentation of Jesus in the Temple167 and the marriage of Mary to the aged Joseph with his flowering rod168—enters as masculinum, as a “bel fanciul mastio”169 and “bastone”170 “nel Santo”171 to ‘marry’ Lucrezia.

On the literal level, she is an unfaithful wife, deceived yet sexually conquered velis nolisve by Callimaco, to whom her husband Nicia had effectively yielded her through deception.172 Callimaco has indeed deceived Lucrezia with the cunning of the papal centaur (Alexander VI of Prince XVIII) and seduced her by beating and striking her with the fury of the impetuous, young, fierce pope (Julius II of Prince XXV). The apology for the virtuous princely rape of Fortune—possessed with or against her own will, already theorized by Pope Pius II—thus seeks to “excite” the action of Pope Leo X, redeemer, through one of his line, of Italy violated by the barbarians. Particularly revealing is the comedy’s final line, in which Fra Timoteo declares to Lucrezia’s mother that he has “messo un tallo in sul vecchio.”173 The evident sexual meaning of the image is to have endowed the old Nicia with a young and potent sexual member. Yet, moving from the light and lascivious letter to the grave and grand allegory of the Mandragola, the final line doubles the erotic and the sacred planes, referring to Joseph’s messianic flowering rod and, through it, identifying the shoot/phallus174 with the messianic flower of Jesse, the Lion of Judah—thus with the Medicean pope, vicar of Christ, masculinum mystically united with his Church and politically with Italy, which he is called to liberate.

Lucrezia herself can thus become, through a typical Renaissance symbolic reversal, a paradoxical image of Mary, mother of the whole Church and therefore of Italy itself (one may recall Prince XXVI, heir to papal propaganda that presented Julius II as the liberator of Italy from the “barbarian” French): first stripped, beaten, violated by foreigners, then languishing in expectation of her rightful avenging spouse, and finally redeemed and rendered fruitful by the power of the young Medicean pope, humanist and ‘musician,’175 but above all messianic head of the house called to redeem Italy. Around 1520, the hoped-for resurrection of Italy’s dead body under the Medicean pope corresponded to the expulsion from Milan of the king of France—who had seized the duchy after the victory of Marignano in 1515 against the Swiss—and of the Spaniards from the Kingdom of Naples.176

In sum, Chiron himself—physician, wise tutor of princes, musician, archer, human and bestial, deceiver and sexually violent—is precisely because of his doubleness capable of recapitulating all the symbolic meanings of the comedy. The image on the title page of the Comedia di Callimaco & Lucretia must therefore depend on a precise Machiavellian allegorical intention, clearly encomiastic and capable of evoking the papal centaur exemplarily presented in Prince XVIII, which concludes with a courtly, though cryptic, exaltation of Leo X as a new centaur-pope in the image of Alexander VI.177 In other words, turning the page,178 the Mandragola reveals the grave theological-political ground beneath its light and voluptuous plot: the will to sexual power is a metaphor for the will to political power;179 the sweetest musical seduction is the other face of the fierce violence of war.180 Pope Leo “Callimaco” is the awaited messianic masculinum called to redeem Lucrezia, a figure of Fortune who must be subdued, and yet also of the Church and of Italy, awaiting a true redeemer, a prince who would become her liberator and spouse, as hoped in Prince XXVI.181

The thematic correspondence between the most serious The Prince and the playful Mandragola is perfect, and cannot be reduced to an anarchically vitalistic Bakhtinian carnivalesque reversal.182 The subversive play is instead functional to the highest political seriousness, which always aims at the constitution of order. Encomiastically, the erotic drama of Callimaco and Lucrezia seeks to celebrate the libido dominandi of the young and impetuous Medicean centaur, “the virtue of an Italian spirit,” that is, of the pope (and his House) who, entering the Holy, conquers a terrestrial possession and enjoys Italy, which awaits him as her true physician and messianic spouse. Italy,

rimasa come sanza vita, aspetta quale possa essere quello che sani le sue ferite […] priega Iddio che li mandi qualcuno che la redima […] tutta pronta e disposta […] purché ci sia uno che la pigli.183

Certainly, when compared with the ascensional Neoplatonic ideology promoted by the fifteenth-century Medici circles and later culturally reconfigured by Warburg’s “enlightenment” philosophy of cultural memory, Machiavelli’s centaur is profoundly subversive. Its subversiveness lies in its rejection of any deceptive idealistic fable. The centaur does not detach itself from its animality to become human and ultimately divine within a Neoplatonic hyperuranium. Instead, it continues to oscillate between its two natures. It draws upon its irreducible animality to acquire, exercise, and increase its earthly power as effectively as possible, by any means necessary, even deceitful or bloody ones, and evil when required.

Only because the man-beast is irreducibly other than himself can he attempt to “deceive time,” or at least slow its ruinous mortal course. He may seek to subdue fortune through virtue, though fortune remains excessive and uncontrollable. He may attempt to convert conflict into order, however precarious.184 In mythological terms, within Machiavelli’s Chiron, the tyrannical Ixion continues to hide and re-emerge. The monstrum is not merely latently present in the human being who has risen to the Apollonian contemplation of rational cosmic order. It is always poised to strike violently and, indeed, actively operative within the political animal. This human-beast imposes itself by drawing upon its Dionysian depths, without which no earthly order—since the celestial one is out of play—can be founded, preserved, or defended.

Finally, it is truly scandalous and impious to present the pontiff as a concupiscent centaur, dominated by the libido dominandi and fiercely determined to construct a temporal power. Such power would moreover be nepotistic and therefore potentially autonomous from the temporal interests of the Church itself. It is hardly accidental that the son of a pope, Cesare Borgia, in the Florentine Secretary’s mythologization, became the greatest realization of the metaphor of the Centaur, as Gennaro Barbuto said.185 Indeed, it is precisely the centaur-like nature of the medieval and even more the Renaissance papacy that legitimizes Machiavelli’s impious political theology. It is no coincidence that the supreme exemplary models of the prince in the treatise are pontiffs. Above all, Machiavelli’s unapologetic justification of an exceptional power capable of suspending the law in order to ensure the life of the political body amounts to a genuine secularization of the theological-political model of papal potestas absoluta.186

One might object that by 1520, with the death of the Medici’s secular heirs, Leo X’s temporal ambitions had waned. Yet one should recall that little more than a year after the Roman performance of the Mandragola, Leo achieved his most significant political success in war: the liberation of Milan from French domination. This was accomplished thanks to the fortunate campaign of the pontifical-imperial army led by his cousin, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, the future Clement VII, who was then a candidate to become the new Duke of Milan. Precisely because this victory represented the long-desired fulfillment of Medicean temporal and nepotistic expansion, Leo is reported to have declared that he experienced more joy at the capture of Milan than at his own papal election.187 Only his sudden death a few days later cut short the pontiff’s towering ambitions. The ‘Callimachean’ pope thus remained a centaur: possessed by libido (dominandi as well as copulandi), yet also physician, musician, and archer.

Machiavelli’s centaur proves heterogeneous to Warburg’s univocal, idealizing, and effectively Neoplatonizing interpretation of the half-man, half-horse monstrum. As noted, it does not indicate an upward movement. Rather, it signals an irreducible dialectical tension that is wholly pragmatic and anti-idealistic. The Chiron of The Prince thus becomes a symbol of the contestability of any unilateral interpretation of the Renaissance.188 The animal component cannot be subdued. It is always insurgent and unsettling, at once destructive and creative. The prince—who at the apex of the social and political pyramid embodies the hegemonic libido of every human being—cannot suppress his bestial, concupiscent, deceitful, and bloody nature. Just as the Apollonian dimension of the human is always disrupted and at the same time revitalized by the Dionysian component, so the tragic condition of a human being radically exposed to insecurity and to fortune, and threatened by other human beings with whom he seeks to construct social order and religious value, continually overturns itself into the joyful vitality of transgression. It becomes the liberating experience of laughter, mockery, and desecration. It becomes the irreducible anarchy of the desire to satisfy the most elementary and urgent impulse. “Behind a countenance by Holbein or Anthony More he must be able to suspect the laughter of Rabelais.”189 Likewise, turning the page, behind the grave Machiavellian text concerned with orders, crises, opportunities, and risky decisions of republics and principalities, one must always be able to read the comedy that celebrates a centaur-like Callimaco or the page that exalts a donkey-man gratifying himself sexually. In doing so, it denounces the being whom others praise as imago Dei and reveals him as the most dissatisfied and unhappy of animals—and precisely for that reason the most ferocious and bestial, unworthy even of a pig.

10. Lorenzo the Magnificent as “Chiron” at the End of the Florentine Histories

The restoration of the centaur as an interpretive image of the Medici prince, in his dual sacred and temporal nature, is confirmed by Machiavelli’s portrayal of Lorenzo the Magnificent, father of Leo X and uncle of Clement VII, as a wise yet erotically charged coincidence of opposites at the end of the Florentine Histories. Although the centaur is not explicitly invoked, Lorenzo is presented, in a striking correspondence with Callimaco in the Mandragola, as a paradoxical man of double nature, at once rational and impulsive. Like the centaur Chiron, he appears as a prudent and cunning master of statecraft and war, yet also as an “animal” possessed by irrepressible erotic desire and by a childlike playful lightness. Thus Machiavelli concludes his portrait:

Tanto che, a considerare in quello la vita leggieri, voluttuosa e la grave, si vedeva in lui essere due persone diverse, quasi con impossibile coniunzione congiunte.190

The variable and contradictory nature of being and of humanity symbolically embodied in the centaur, the alter ego of Christ as a person of double nature, therefore returns to suggest the dual nature of the Medici prince. It is precisely the careful politics of the centaur Lorenzo that allow the Medici house to ascend to the conquest of the papal throne:

Giovanni, suo secondo figliuolo, alla dignità del cardinalato trasse. Il che tanto fu più notabile, quanto, fuora d’ogni passato esemplo, non avendo ancora quattordici anni, fu a tanto grado condotto; il che fu una scala da potere fare salire la sua casa in cielo, come poi, ne’ seguenti tempi, intervenne.191

Lorenzo’s double nature thus raises the Medici house “to heaven,” generating an even more powerful centaur: the sacred-temporal pontifical prince. As has been noted, the triumphal apparatus of Leo X’s entry into Rome in 1513 celebrated this ascent of the Medici centaur into heaven. Machiavelli himself therefore shares a fully courtly encomiastic code, one that he reproduces with reference to Clement VII, the pope who, as a cardinal, had commissioned the Florentine Histories and who, as pope, receives them dedicated to him. In the dedication, Machiavelli calls himself the pope’s “humble servant,” preparing to be employed by Clement VII in diplomatic, political, propagandistic, and military tasks, which he would indeed carry out between 1515 and 1527.192 He does not neglect, however, to refer to Giuliano de’ Medici, the pope’s father, stressing how his assassination at a young age prevented him from manifesting his virtue. Yet that virtue is exalted through his greatest achievement: having generated a pontiff.

Nondimeno assai grandi e magnifiche furono l’opere sue, avendo generato la S.V.; la quale opera a tutte quelle de’ suoi maggiori di gran lunga contrappesa e più seculi gli aggiugnerà di fama.193

The Iulius who, in Poliziano, had been converted to Venus-Minerva and then slain in a conspiracy orchestrated by Pope Sixtus IV, lives again in his son Giulio, who became pope and in whom his apotheosis is fulfilled. Giulio de’ Medici’s illegitimate conception, the fruit of erotic passion, is thus sublimated into a providential virtuous act. It transfigures the voluptuous yet grave Medici centaur into a dimension of imperishable historical greatness.

11. The Machiavellian Centaur in Alciato’s Emblemata

In 1531, the eminent jurist Andrea Alciato published in Augsburg the first edition of the Emblemata,194 a work inspired by the Adagia of Erasmus and destined for immense success in Renaissance culture, with more than one hundred editions appearing within a century. Subject to numerous textual and iconographic additions, the edition published in Venice in 1546 by Paolo Manuzio under Alciato’s own supervision introduced a new emblem entitled Consiliarji principum, accompanied by an image that interprets the figure of the centaur as a symbol of princely duplicity. Here are Alciato’s verses: “Heroum genitos, et magnum fertur Achillem/In stabulis Chiron erudijsse suis./Semiferum doctorem, et semiuirum centaurum,/Assideat quisquis regibus, esse docet./Est fera, dum uiolat socios, dum proterit hostes:/Estque homo, dum simulat se populo esse pium.195

Chiron thus becomes the prince’s double teacher. He is human when, with foxlike cunning, he pretends to be pious and religious. He is bestial when he eliminates his socii (as Romulus did his brother Remus) and destroys his enemies. The dependence on The Prince is unmistakable.196 Machiavelli alone had interpreted the human-beast centaur not merely as a fierce and sensual warrior, but above all as a great simulator and dissembler, called upon to appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious, yet to remain inwardly prepared, when necessary, to become the opposite and to act against faith, charity, humanity, and religion.197 Below (Figure 16), I have placed beside the Aldine image the other two illustrations accompanying the emblem Consiliarji principum in the Rouillé edition (Lyon, 1551)198 and in the Plantin editions (Antwerp, 1573 and 1577).199

In the latter two illustrations, the centaur appears as a stimulator: he holds a stimulus, a whip used to spur his young pupil to study a book.200 Yet at his side lie bow and quiver, ready for lethal use. The Antwerp editions add an extensive commentary on both verses and the image by Claude Mignault (Claudius Minos). This commentary refers not only to Alciato’s political writings but also explicitly cites chapter XVIII of The Prince. Mignault paraphrases Machiavelli’s image of the prince-centaur of double nature: human as lawgiver, yet also required to be beast, in particular a violent lion and a fraudulent fox. Machiavelli is therefore described by Mignault as “in ciuilibus negotiis admodum perspicacem, & magni certe ingenij virum, sed in quo tamen parum fidei esset & verae religionis, vt eius scripta declarant.”201

Less incisive than Alciato’s Machiavellian interpretation is the reading of the centaur proposed by Pierio Valeriano in his highly influential Hieroglyphica. Valeriano, formerly an intellectual of the Leonine papal court and secretary to Giulio de’ Medici, assigns the centaur an exclusively negative symbolism. First, the double-natured monster signifies the lubricitas of human life, its concupiscent alienation. Human existence thus degrades inexorably, corrupting itself and bestializing until it dissolves, “propterea quod mira lapsi lubricitate incauti semper arripimur.”202 More traditionally, the centaur—and Chiron himself—signifies “meretricia petulantia.” This vice turns man into a furious beast, enslaved by “immoderata lascivia” and bound by “voluptatis vinculum,” to the point that “ferinae partes tyrannidem in nobis occupent.” One may therefore call “hippobinon hominem qui sit libidini venereisque negotijs intemperanter deditus.”203

12. Chiron in France: Rosso Fiorentino

More than a decade before the appearance of Alciato’s Machiavellian emblem of Chiron as educator of princes, Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino, had already painted for Francis I of France an image of the centaur as teacher of Achilles. In the splendid fresco (Figure 17) executed around 1535 in the Gallery of Francis I at the Château de Fontainebleau, emphasis falls not on cultural education but on the prince’s physical and military training. Cultural instruction remains present, yet secondary: at the left Achilles receives lessons in the liberal arts, at the right in music, and perhaps at the center in drawing. The foreground instead highlights martial formation. Achilles is trained in fencing and taught to swim and hunt in the water, under the guidance of Chiron, master of war and the chase. The fresco’s double scene nevertheless illustrates the Chiron-like capacity of the ideal-real prince—here identified with the king of France rather than with a Medici pope or his offspring—to be both wise and impetuous, prudent and violent. Moreover, the prominence given to the training that “masters” the aquatic element appears to me an allusion to the rushing river of Fortune. Such a river must be confronted with foresightful and practiced virtue, and with martial strength. This is the virtue claimed by Rosso’s patron, King Francis I, an authentic ‘Callimaco.’204

Rosso thus attests to an early exportation of the Machiavellian ideology of the prince educated by Chiron. Francis I is encomiastically exalted as a centaur-prince, a double political figure capable of mastering fortune through prudence and violence. In fact, Rosso Fiorentino lived in Rome between 1524 and 1527 within the Medicean orbit of Clement VII.205 In that same milieu, Machiavelli operated as a secret agent, diplomat, and strategist of both statecraft and war. He worked to prepare and wage the anti-imperial conflict launched by the League of Cognac and concluded with the tragic Sack of Rome. It is worth recalling that one of Rosso’s works, Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro (1526), was commissioned, as Vasari reports, by Giovanni Bandini.206 Bandini, among other things, owned a manuscript of the Discourses on Livy before their printed publication in 1531.207 A portrait of Machiavelli has even been attributed to Rosso.208

13. Vasari, the Pontifical Foundation of Palazzo Vecchio, and the Machiavellian Chiron

It is in ducal Florence that the centaur reappears as a symbol both Medicean and Machiavellian. In the Ragionamenti (1557), Giorgio Vasari composes a treatise of theological-political iconology. He stages it as an interpretive dialogue with “the prince,” Francesco de’ Medici. Through this device he describes the entire new structure and vast pictorial allegory of Palazzo Vecchio, transformed from the institutional seat of the republic into the true palace of Cosimo I. The iconographic program had been devised by Cosimo Bartoli, a reader of Machiavelli.209 The declared premise of the work is the splendid analogy between political art and the art of architecture. Both are capable of messianic “miracles: “making the lame walk, healing a damaged body, turning the old into the new, and bringing the dead back to life. In short, they make the impossible happen.210 One might therefore regard the Ragionamenti as the iconographic double of The Prince. They celebrate in images the greatness of the new Medicean ruler generated by the pontifical power of Leo X and Clement VII.211 This is demonstrated by the Salone dei Cinquecento. Built by Savonarola as the Great Council’s hall, it was later transformed into a monumental ducal throne room. At the center of the back wall stands a gigantic statue of Leo X, executed by Baccio Bandinelli and Vincenzo de Rossi (1555–1565). On one side stands that of Clement VII crowning Charles V, by Bandinelli and Giovan Battista Caccini (c. 1554–1590), originally intended for the central niche (Figure 18). These two Medici popes appear as true theological-political centaurs. They embody the supreme spiritual and temporal authority of Christendom, engaged in war—from the capture of Milan in 1521 to the war for the liberty of Italy in 1526–1527—ostensibly for the freedom of the Church, yet also for the nepotistic expansion of Medici power. They are therefore immortalized as the two sacred foundations of their lay descendant, Cosimo I.

A significant detail supports reading the Ragionamenti as a mirror of The Prince. While illustrating a cartoon (now lost) for a tapestry in the Sala degli Elementi, on the second floor of Palazzo Vecchio directly above the Sala of Leo X (who had “created” the primordial elements for the greatness of the dynasty), Vasari tells the duke’s son that he depicted the virtuous education of the Medici prince through the birth of Chiron from Philyra, conceived with Saturn (bearer of the Medicean Golden Age) transformed into a horse. Strikingly, the education proposed is openly inspired by Machiavelli’s centaur, fully recognizable as the model behind the

uomini degni e pieni di dottrina, e ammaestramenti buoni; perché avendo a governare i popoli del vostro dominio, vi è necessario sapere infinite cose, ancorché io sappia che ne sapete assai, vivendosi oggi più con simulazione e inganni, che con altri modi; acciò Teti uscita dall’onde faticose, la quale fece insegnare all’astuto Achille il saper vivere, faccia il medesimo Vostra Eccellenza.212

Machiavelli, a master of cunning and a knower of the “infinite cose,” or virtues, that define the authentic political “saper viver,” marked by “simulazioni e inganni,” was ultimately formally recognized as a new “Chiron,” a tutor “degno e pieno di dottrina” for the Medici prince. To him, he imparts his centaur-like political science, embodied in the “astuto Achille,” who in himself recapitulates the invincible strength of the lion and the double intelligence of the fox.

As noted, the entire Vasarian iconography of the Palazzo Vecchio is intended to celebrate the glory and the “divine” absolute power of Cosimo I de’ Medici. This power rests on the pillars of the two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII. Upon them—certainly with the support of Charles V—the whole structure of his princely authority had been built. Significantly, the two popes are represented by two

sacrifizj. Questi sono li sacrosanti Eroi fatti dal grande Dio ne’ due Pontefici sommi di questa casa Illustre, i quali hanno fatto nel loro Pontificato sacrifizj all’Altissimo Dio, non solo Padre del tempo, ma delle vite e morti degli uomini, in memoria de’ quali oggi per loro facciamo questi ricordi, sacrificandoli queste tante fatiche di questi uomini virtuosi, i quali in quest’opera illustrano dopo morte la fama loro.213

Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, who “chiedeva il Machiavello,”214 and his son Francesco I de’ Medici, educated to become duplicitous after the example of the Machiavellian centaur, are formally recognized as a virtuous secular shoot blossoming from the theological-political trunk of the two Medici popes. They are presented as generated by the sacrifices, both religious and temporal, of Leo X and Clement VII. The primordial fire of the alchemical kri of power is therefore pontifical. It forms the background to a painting by Giovanni Battista Buti (Figure 19), executed to adorn the Studiolo of Grand Duke Francesco I, designed by Giorgio Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini. In this work, the arcane depth of the wisdom of Chiron is made to appear. He is shown as the educator of the medicus Aesculapius, a figure of the Medici prince.215

14. Conclusions

This necessarily summary iconological investigation seeks to show that Machiavelli’s image of the centaur—destined for extraordinary fortune in Western political thought—must be contextualized within Medicean ideological iconology, where it already played a highly significant role from the time of Cosimo de’ Medici. Already in the late fifteenth century, Machiavelli was preceded by numerous court intellectuals and artists. They were interpreters of a precise political, cultural, and religious exaltation undertaken by Cosimo pater patriae for himself and for his dynasty, later inherited by Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Giuliano de’ Medici. Donatello and his assistants, Angelo Poliziano and Sandro Botticelli, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola all attest to the persistence of an encomiastic catasterism of the Medici. This found significant expression in the Pulpits of the ‘cosmic’ tomb at San Lorenzo and in the exaltation of the victim Giuliano. He appears as a loving centaur transfigured into a princeps patiens, chosen by Pallas/Venus Urania, then raised to the heavens and eternalized. In the centaur governed by Pallas—armed and peaceful Wisdom, whose very epithet reveals the reference to the Medici balls—one may thus recognize the Renaissance dynamism of retracting the classical into the Christian. This process culminates in the ideological exaltation of the Medici family, rulers of the new Athens identified with the new messianic Jerusalem. After the pontifical “ascent to heaven” of Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), the centaur becomes even more clearly ‘christologized.’ In Florentine and Roman encomiastic propaganda, Chiron comes to designate the double figure of Leo X, the culminating realization of the Medici family’s messianic promotion. The son of the Magnificent has become at once the sacred vicar of Christ and the supreme temporal prince. He appears religious, humane, peaceful, and charitable. Yet he is secretly deceptive, fierce, intensely sensual, bellicose, and a promoter of an unscrupulous nepotistic policy. Immediately after his accession to the papacy, the centaur is attested in Rome and Florence as a symbol of both the pontiff and of the secular Medici prince, his brother Giuliano. It is therefore Leo X who prompts Machiavelli, in chapter XVIII of The Prince, to mirror the new Medici ruler in the centaur-like Alexander VI, the pontiff father of the impious yet virtuous Valentino. This takes place within a play of mirrors in which the Medici pope is re/veiled as the more perfect image of the Borgia pope. In short, the copyright of the Machiavellian centaur remains structurally Medicean. Not only its appearance in chapter XVIII of The Prince, but also its return as the emblem of the Mandragola in its first printed edition, functions as a conscious courtly tribute to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s son. He had “ascended to heaven” in the ecclesiastical sense thanks to the ‘double nature’—wise and erotic, peaceful and princely—of his father, inherited and sublimated upon the papal throne. The sacred prince, promoted by the earthly prince, thus becomes the promoter of an extremely ambitious nepotistic principate. In Machiavelli’s double game—speculum in which the virtuous unscrupulousness of the Renaissance pontiff is reflected—the exaltation of the Medici ‘messiah,’ with subversive and secularizing ambiguity, opens the way to the full autonomy of the political sphere.

It is therefore unsurprising to find a conscious legacy of Machiavelli’s interpretation of Chiron—now emancipated from its Medicean and pontifical origin—in Andrea Alciato and in Rosso Fiorentino. Before moving to the court of Francis I, Rosso had been close to Clement VII and his court, where Machiavelli himself had been summoned by the pope to assist in preparing and waging the anti-imperial war.

It is nonetheless Giorgio Vasari—painter, architect, art historian, and iconologist ideologically engaged by the new prince Cosimo I—who bears witness to the full fusion of Medici identity, the image of the centaur, and the Machiavellian manus chironia. He does so not only by entrusting the education of Francesco, the duke’s son, to the most scandalous pages of The Prince, but also by openly celebrating, in the Salone dei Cinquecento and in the architecture of Palazzo Vecchio, the centaur-like pontifical foundation of Medici political intelligence and earthly glory.