Bestand:Minotaurus.gif

English: The Minotaur (represented here as a man's head and torso joined to a bull's body, in reverse of the Classical tradition showing a bull's head on a man's body) at the centre of the Labyrinth, depicted on a gem.
According to Hermann Kern (Through the Labyrinth, Prestel, 2000, item 371, p. 202), the original gem is in the Medici Collection in the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Kern assigns the gem to the 16th century, stating that Maffei "erroneously deemed the piece to be from Classical antiquity". (The Labyrinth is depicted in a style unknown in Classical times but common in the Renaissance.) The Minotaur is here represented (as not uncommonly in medieval and later times) as a bucentaur, the reverse of the usual classical representation (a bull's head on a man's body). This is occasionally mistaken for a centaur; but the association with the Labyrinth makes it clear that it represents the Minotaur, and the artist has been careful to carve the hooves in bovine, not equine, form. The tuft on the belly is also typical of a bull, not a horse.