Cheírōn through the eyes of sculptors, painters, and craftsmen across the ages
The Education of Achilles — the great fresco from Herculaneum's Augusteum, in which the wise centaur guides the boy's hand across the lyre: music before war, the first lesson of the tutor of heroes.
Apollo, Chiron and Asclepius — a Roman wall-painting of the god of Delphi entrusting his son to the centaur's keeping: from Chiron's cave on Pelion, the healing art itself descends.
Chiron holding Achilles — an Etruscan black-figure amphora attributed to the Praxias Group, the fosterage rendered in silhouette: the centaur cradles the child whom Peleus surrendered to his care.
Thetis retrieving Achilles from Chiron — a fourth-century mosaic from Tipasa, set above the discovery on Skyros: the sea-goddess comes to claim her son back from the centaur, and the idyll of Pelion ends.
Achilles and Chiron sarcophagus — white marble from the Via Casilina, carved for a Roman tomb in the late third century: even at the edge of death, the patron commissioned the centaur's lesson.
Chiron teaching medicine to Asclepius — a southern Italian medical miscellany of c. 1250 keeps the centaur exactly where the Middle Ages placed him: enthroned at the head of the physician's art.
Thetis and Chiron — Georg Pencz's engraving of 1543: the Nereid kneels before the old master of Pelion to plead her son's destiny, the ancient myth recut by a Renaissance burin.
