Hello, my name is Stephanie Wiles, and I'm the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, and you're looking at one of my favorite paintings in the Gallery, Antonio del Pollaiuolo's "Hercules and Deianira." The landscape depicts the city of Florence and the Arno Valley.

We have Hercules about to shoot Nessus the centaur, who's abducting Hercules's pregnant wife, Deianira. About Deianira what I find so fascinating is that her left fingers splay outward. So as you're looking at the painting, if you look straight to the center and up toward the mountains and just slightly to the left, where her left hand is placed, there is the center of the city of Florence as we know it, with the Duomo, the cathedral, in the center, and also the Palazzo Vecchio, which is the town hall. So that's the ecclesiastical and the civic centers of Florence that she's capturing.

Florence, at this time in the Renaissance, was the home of the Medici. It was a wealthy city where artists were coming to work. So for me, that added a whole new layer to the meaning of this painting and makes me question what's the significance of Hercules saving his wife? How is she also protecting the city in some way?

It's something that I didn't notice myself for a very long time. I had to look at this painting over and over again because your attention is taken by Hercules as he pulls the arrow back—a lot of tension and rigor there, obviously, by silhouetting that body against the blue of the Arno River. And then also the same over here. Nessus the centaur sort of holds tight onto Deianira's pregnant belly as she gestures out. So it took me a very long time to see that detail and to think about what that means in the painting and in the meaning of this painting.

I think as you walk through the galleries and you see some of the earlier Italian Renaissance and Renaissance paintings, this stops you because of its naturalism. Pollaiuolo was really known for his understanding of anatomy. It did come through dissection, which was very unusual in the Renaissance to have the ability to cut up human bodies. But I thought it was interesting that Vasari, in his book "Lives of the Artists"—and he was an Italian Renaissance painter and writer—described Pollaiuolo as "the first master to skin many human bodies in order to investigate the muscles and understand the nude in a more modern way."

So there's also a certain modernity to this picture in the body. And I think as you look around the room behind you and around, you'll see that this is really a kind of human look at the body and a really deep understanding of musculature and something that you don't think about as much until you get to the seventeenth century, with artists like Rubens and others.