Dimitri Hadzi
Centaur and Lapith, 1956
Cast bronze
Gift of Jack Lawrence
Born in Brooklyn to Greek-immigrant parents, sculptor Dimitri Hadzi transformed the Classical past of his ethnic heritage into modern abstractions. In Centaur and Lapith, Hadzi turns to Greek mythology. According to one version of the story, the centaurs and Lapiths are related. The races descended from a pair of brothers, the children of the god Apollo and a nymph. The centaurs were animalistic and deformed, and mated with horses, thus becoming the horse-man hybrid we know from tales like Harry Potter. The Lapiths, on the other hand, produced a race of intelligent, rational, and controlled people.
This sculpture represents an episode from, of all things, a wedding party. The king of the Lapiths invited the centaurs to his daughter’s marriage ceremony. The centaurs turned out to be real party animals—they got drunk and made off with the bride and many of the female guests. This led to an epic battle, during which the more civilized Lapiths triumphed over their equestrian brothers. However, the story is more than surface deep—the Greeks often used it as a visual metaphor to depict their own military triumphs, picturing themselves as the wise and restrained Lapiths, while they saw their enemies as the uncontrolled and animalistic centaurs. If we continue to think about the subject as a metaphor, why might it be an appropriate choice for a college campus?
Of course, Hadzi’s bronze differs dramatically from the more realistic Greek depictions of the story.