Grace and Beauty

This chapter considers whether court ladies required the same qualities as male courtiers. Grace, it turns out, is as vital for women of the court as it is for men, but womanly grace is more closely linked to beauty and to what Italians today refer to as bella presenza than its manly counterpart. The chapter explores how two women authors, Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d'Aragona, sever the links that unite grace and beauty in male discourse. In Colonna's love poetry (ca. 1525–1535), grace resists semantic absorption into refined womanly appearances and rhetoric and turns, instead, towards spirituality that admits of no physical or corporeal manifestation. Tullia d'Aragona, by contrast, rejects the language of grace outright, identifying it as an impossible feminine standard, on the one hand, and perilously close to the language of sexual graces and favours, on the other. In her Rime (Poems) and Dialogo dell'infinità d'amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love) (both published in 1547), she identifies it as a word requiring sensitive handling, an instrument of control to flee from and a semantic trap set by men inclined in their treatment of women to the extremes of praise and blame.