The Centauress is a provocative variation on the traditional equestrian monument. Instead of a hero mounted on a horse, the heroine and the horse have become one. Rodin combined two previous works in the design: The horse comes from an unrealized plan for a sculpture of a Chilean general. He adapted the woman from a male figure in The Gates from Hell.

Why create this amalgam? Rodin described a struggle between humanity’s “two natures. . . . An image of the soul whose ethereal impulses remain miserably imprisoned in the corporeal mire!”