Room 58
Piero Di Cosimo, Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs
“Furniture was often made to celebrate marriage; the subject would have been regarded as entertaining for such a purpose. It is from Ovid‘s ‘Metamorphoses’ (XII, 210ff.) and shows drunken centaurs disrupting the wedding feast of the king of the Lapiths, one of them seizing the bride by her hair (right foreground). Among many grotesque and lewd incidents is the lyrical episode of the centaur Hylonome kissing her lover Cyllarus as he dies from a javelin wound.”
Piero del Pollaiuolo, Apollo and Daphne
“The god Apollo pursued the nymph Daphne. She prayed for rescue and was turned into a laurel tree as he touched her.”
The quotes on this page are from the descriptions of the original paintings by the National Gallery.