A tall young woman in a white gown patterned with interlocked rings and a green cloak, sprays of leaves in her hair and on her sleeves, grips a centaur by the hair with one hand while holding a long battle-axe upright in the other. The bearded centaur cowers beneath her, a bow in his hand. A stone ruin rises at the left, and a harbor with ships lies behind them. The Uffizi says the picture, like Botticelli's other mythological works, raises many doubts of interpretation: from early inventories and literary sources the woman is thought to be Pallas Athena (Minerva), goddess of knowledge, or Camilla, a virgin warrior.

The centaur stands for the feral instincts of humanity, so the work reads as an allegory of virtues that restrain a passionate temperament. Her dress carries the three-ring emblem of the Medici. Sandro Botticelli painted it about 1480–85. The painting belonged to the Medici, to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the Uffizi says it may have been commissioned for his marriage to Semiramide Appiani in 1482.

It is in the Uffizi in Florence.