ABSTRACT
The various aspects of grace were uniquely embodied in a simple artistic representation, popular throughout Antiquity, and again in the Renaissance: the Three Graces. Whether as a statue, a fresco or a miniature, this image of three beautiful young women embracing each other, forming a circular motion had an enormous success. There was ‘no other group from antiquity that has exerted so persistent an impact on the imagination’; a group showing a ‘devious theory’ of a ‘perilous alchemy of the mind’, illustrating the thesis that ‘those allegories which seem the most ridiculous at first, might prove in the end to be the most vital’ (Wind 1967[1958]: 26-7).
