The Three Graces

 Botticelli’s masterpiece La Primavera  is known in English translation as The Rites of Spring (why do English translations always fall so short?). One set piece detail encompasses three women, laced in a dance, archetypally arranged.  They are meant to portray a deeply metaphysical symbol.  The Three Graces.  Indeed, the whole painting is meant to resonate at a deeply neoplatonic level. Hermes at one side, the beneficently fecund Aphrodite in Renaissance robes holding forth at the other.  But my experience focuses on the three dancing figures.

They are particularly special to me.  A huge reproduction of them, cropped in a lovely gilt frame (huge, like four by six feet at least), has been a part of my living spaces for 27 years now.  I know the time period exactly. My first husband had it delivered just before my second child was born, along with a rocking chair and a Picasso (reproduction) of a nursing mother and child, something sentimental from his blue period.

So. I reflect on the Graces and their depth. Their history. On my shifting walls over time, they have always been lovely, beautiful, and (yes) graceful, even in their reproduced, matte board, crazily overblown form.  The word Grace derives from the Latin. Gratia. But the true substantive source of these women finds its home in the Greek: they were the Charities (Χάριτες), together embodying that aspect of love that informs our word charity, a love that is generous, graceful, beautiful, other-focused, hopeful.  They were considered to be the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, the goddess of broad pastures. In Botticelli, they dance, holding each others’ hands, glancing off beyond themselves, projecting a startling, unselfconscious beauty.  Their names, from youngest to oldest, are Aglae (“Splendor”), Euphrosyne (“Mirth”), and Thalia (“Good Cheer”).  

For the moment, my three graces are in storage.  I miss them. (And consequently think of them tonight.) I wonder how they might inform all the unfolding things that take place around me these days. I am, as a wonderful Jesuit I knew used to say in the face of poverty and incomprehension, hopeful but not optimistic. Yet I  nevertheless remain entranced by possibility. The three graces dance.

I will dance with them.