Allegory is not always so allegoric

Allegory is a very common theme in Renaissance paintings, but sometimes it has very strong ties with everyday reality instead.

Take the"Pallas and the Centaur painting of Sandro Botticell (circa 1482), which is housed at the Uffizi in Florence now.

This is what wikipedia writes about it:

Pallas and the Centaur is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, circa 1482. It is housed in the Uffizi of Florence. The painting was discovered in 1895,[1]
An inventory dating from 1499, which was not discovered until 1975, lists the property of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and his brother Giovanni and states that in the 15th century the Primavera had been displayed in Florence's city palace, and that the painting of "Pallas and the Centaur" (though the title is conventional) was hung above a door in the same room as the former. The Medici commission is showed by the presence of three rings interwoven on the dress of Pallas.
The painting's bare landscape focuses one's gaze on the two figures. A centaur has trespassed on forbidden territory. This lusty being, half horse and half man, is being brought under control by a guard-nymph armed with a shield and halberd, and she has grabbed him by the hair. The woman has been identified both as the goddess Pallas Athena and the Amazon Camilla, chaste heroine of Virgil's Aeneid. What is undisputed is the moral content of the painting, in which virtue is victorious over sensuality through the use of reason. The two parts of the human soul, reason and instinct fighting one another, are represented by the double nature of the centaur. The latter, whose classical epithet is Chiron was maybe inspired by some classic relief, though the pathetic expression is wholly by Botticelli.
This painting marks the end of Botticelli's Medicean period, from this point onwards the subject-matter of his paintings changes and becomes increasingly religious. (Cited from Wikipedia).

Very educative.

But... if you read also Lorenzo The Peasant's biography on Wikipedia, you may discover a different, and very common, reality:

He was also supposedly the metaphorical subject of Botticelli's Pallas Athene Taming a Centaur, which was a gift to him from his distant cousin Lorenzo de' Medici (il Magnifico), on the occasion of his marriage to Semiramide d'Appiani. Il Magnifico apparently knew Lorenzo to be of brutal and debauched character, and it is supposed that in this painting he was trying to indicate that she should bring Lorenzo under control.