Image: Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford
Christ Church Picture Gallery’s Filippino Lippi masterpiece 'The Wounded Centaur' is now on view at the National Gallery in London, where it has been placed on display in Room 62 of the Sainsbury Wing while Christ Church’s Oxford gallery undergoes a major refurbishment. The loan gives visitors in Trafalgar Square a rare chance to see one of the best-known works in the Christ Church collection outside Oxford.
Christ Church described the painting as one of the Picture Gallery’s most significant holdings. Painted around 1495 by the Florentine artist Filippino Lippi, 'The Wounded Centaur' is presented by the college as an Italian Renaissance work of unusual intellectual and visual complexity, and as an early example in which landscape is given equal importance to the mythological figures within it.
The picture shows a centaur in an open landscape examining a decorated orange quiver and the arrows inside it, with one arrow lodged in its raised hoof. A female centaur shelters in the shadow of a cave with two young, while Cupid reclines on a grassy bank nearby holding an orange-coloured bow. Christ Church’s account emphasises the ambiguity of the scene and the way the painting invites viewers to form their own interpretation of the moment depicted.
The college says the work was designed to provoke debate among viewers, an approach it presents as a valued form of artistic genius in Florence at the time. It also notes that Filippino Lippi was among the leading artists of his generation, combining intellectual inventiveness with stylistic elegance and beauty. He trained with his father, Fra Filippo Lippi, alongside Sandro Botticelli, and later joined Botticelli’s workshop before becoming an independent master.
'The Wounded Centaur' entered the Christ Church collection in 1828, when it was gifted to the college by the diplomat, botanist and collector William Thomas Horner Fox-Strangways, later 4th Earl of Ilchester. Christ Church says the painting has been displayed to the public in Oxford since its arrival, though its fragility meant it rarely left the city.
The National Gallery display places the work among other Florentine Renaissance paintings in the same room, including Botticelli’s 'Mars and Venus', Paolo Uccello’s 'Battle of San Romano' and Piero di Cosimo’s 'Death of a Nymph'. Christ Church noted that the National Gallery remains free to visit and said the loan would allow many more people to encounter the painting while the Picture Gallery is being refurbished.
