THE THREE GRACES IN RENAISSANCE ART: ORIGINS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF A THEME. (VOLUMES I AND II)

In this study the theme of the Three Graces is explored from its pre-Hellenic religious origins in Crete and its illustration in Greek and Roman art through its many uses in Renaissance art. Scholarship on the subject of the Graces has tended to focus only on its application to isolated works of art. As a result, the theme and its importance for Renaissance artists have not been fully understood. The dissociation of the image from its roots has led to the misconception that the Graces were either handmaidens of Venus or symbols of Plato's trinitarian view of love. The purpose of the study is to show how Renaissance artists rejoined these goddesses with their roots in ancient Greek religion and art. The premise underlying each chapter is my conviction that Renaissance transformations of the Three Graces revive the spirit, form the meaning of some aspect of the ancient Greek Charites.;In the first chapter the reader is introduced to the mythology of the three Charites: their parentage and functions; and the etymology of their names, which reflect their regenerative character. The earliest cult of the Charites at Crete and Paros was funereal. Thus, four chapters are devoted to the use of the theme in Roman and Renasissance funerary art.;The second major Greek shrine of the Charites was located on the Acropolis at Athens. The association of the Athenian Charites with Hermes Propylaios generated a special iconographic type which is reflected in Renaissance springtime allegories in which Hermes accompanies the three Graces.;The two final chapters deal with the origins and the invention of a canonical way of depicting the three Graces. As an emblematic group of heraldically posed nude figures, the three Graces symbolized principles of fertility, Neoplatonic love, liberality, and the humanist conception of fame.;Renaissance and ancient examples are integrated into a scheme which follows the chronological development of the theme in Greek religion and art. Thus the ten chapters have been organized according to the four phases of the evolution of the Charites as an object of worship at Paros and in Greece, evidence of which survives in the writings of Greek and Latin philosophers, dramatists and poets, and in coins, gems, and Graeco-Roman sculpture. Iconographic interpretations of the Renaissance descendants of these Greek types is made by analyzing the artist's choice and treatment of the ancient visual or literary prototype, which in many instances amounts to a fusion of several visual motifs with literary descriptions belonging to a different, even later type.