Centaur Handmade Relief (18X25cm/7.08”X9.84”)

A Centaur is a mythological creature with the head, arms, and torso of a human and the body and legs of a horse. In early Attican and Beotian vase-paintings, they are depicted with the hindquarters of a horse attached to them. In later renderings centaurs are given the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse’s withers, where the horse’s neck would be. This half-human and half-horse composition has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings, caught between the two natures, embodied in contrasted myths, both as the embodiment of untamed nature, as in their battle with the Lapiths,or conversely as teachers, like Chiron. The centaurs were usually said to have been born of Ixion and Nephele. Another version, however, makes them children of a certain Centaurus, who mated with the Magnesian mares. In this statue Chiron carries Eros (child of Aphrodite) 5th century BC.