Homer and the Greek lyricists thought grace was poetry's enchanting power, but in medieval times its religious denotation prevailed; then, during the Renaissance and even more so in the 15th century, grace was the privileged focus of theories that further widened its variety of meanings. With modernism and then post-modernism the notion of grace fell upon harder times, yet it remains a fundamental feature of our contemporary feelings and knowledge. Throughout history grace has been a remarkable device of imagination and art and supplied people with an array of rhetorical, compositional, conceptual, mental, sentimental, intuitional and emotional tools, a kit of iconographies and cultural attitudes. By touching on myths, philosophy, and exceptional art, in this book Raffaele Milani develops his reflections on the most important aesthetic concept and places its many faces in a grand and well-balanced perspective.

Raffaele Milani teaches Aesthetics at the University of Bologna.