Ita Mac Carthy's study on grace, a prominent keyword of the Italian Renaissance, introduces us in fresh ways to the works of many renowned authors and artists of sixteenth-century Italy, an era remarkable for its political energies, artistic creations, and social and religious movements. She takes us first to the Salone dei mesi (Room of the months) in Duke Borso d'Este's Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara to contemplate Francesco del Cossa's fresco, Allegory of April (ca. 1469), whose subject radiates grace, made clear by the appearance in the fresco's upper right-hand corner of the three Graces of classical tradition swaying rhythmically in dance. She sets before us a composition that displays “the aesthetic, ethical, material, and moral virtues united in the word ‘grace.’” The image of “an ideal grace-infused community” captures the world of ducal Ferrara as “an idyll of generosity and civility” (2). But she warns us at the start that the ideal does not always match reality. Grace can often be reciprocated with ingratitude or other less identifiable responses. Investigating diverse notions of grace by writers and artists leads to wondrous surprises about the vibrant culture of the Italian Renaissance and the elusive gift of grace that alights it.

Mac Carthy's discursive, often meditative style draws us deeply into the complex layers, contradictions, and semantic richness embodied in the idea of grace, one of the most “beguiling and deceptively powerful of early modern keywords” (26). Methodologically, she applies critical philological analysis, rejects the notion that grace was understood by everyone in the same way, and presents it as a dynamic agent challenging any effort to fix the ideal and the real worlds of the Italian Renaissance. This leads her to revisit the very concept of “The Italian Renaissance”: what exactly was it? And more pertinently, “Is there any such thing as ‘the grace of the Italian Renaissance’?” If so, which? Her answer: “all of them, and a few more beside” (12). She proposes to examine each closely in its many varieties and complex cultural intersections in the literary, artistic, political, and religious currents of this period.

Mac Carthy enlists a diverse group of poets, writers, artists, and courtiers, which include Francesco del Cossa, Raphael Sanzio, Baldassare Castiglione, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vittoria Colonna, Tullia d'Aragona, Lodovico Ariosto, Lodovico Dolce, Pietro Bembo, Cristoforo Landino, and Torquato Tasso. Their visual and verbal works draw deeply from various cultural currents—such as the literary debate on “The Language Question” (questione delle lingue), the humanists’ revival of antiquity, Neoplatonism, Christian classicism, and much besides—to explore the diverse understandings of grace arising in artistic, literary, and religious contexts. Many humanists, for example, identified grace as the crucial quality of ancient eloquence, while religious reformers found the idea preeminently in biblical and patristic writers like Paul and Augustine, for whom grace was a divine attitude, a relationship of divine favor, and an unmerited gift of God expressed perfectly in the angel Gabriel's salutation to Mary in Luke 1:28: “Hail, full of grace” (Ave gratia plena).

Central to Mac Carthy's study is Castiglione's Il Libro del cortegiano, which posits grace as “a certain nonchalance (sprezzatura) which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless” (52). Castiglione also invents a theory of grace that caught the attention of poets, artists, litterati, and reformers. Mac Carthy ponders the portrait of Castiglione by Raphael, “the painter . . . held to combine the most complete grace of form” (54), probing Castiglione's likeness for its affinities with and departures from his idea of the courtier. She further observes that grace was every bit as vital for women of the court as for male courtiers, though a woman's grace was more a function of beauty, the bella presenza. Mac Carthy's study of two prominent women authors, Vittoria Colonna and Tullia d'Aragona, takes us far beyond the Castiglione-Raphael exemplar by severing the nexus in male discourse between grace and beauty. Colonna's love poetry (ca. 1525–1535) envisions grace as wholly other than feminine courtly sprezzatura and natural beauty; rather, it is a kind of spiritual relation “that admits of no physical or corporeal manifestation” (27). Her counterpart, Tullia d'Aragona, however, eschews all truck with any contemporary courtly notion, “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” (27). D'Aragona approaches it warily as “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.” Colonna's more mature work, Rime spirituali (Spiritual Poems), advances even further to espouse a more “developed grace [that] bears the hallmark of religious debate about reform and counterreform and chimes in striking ways with the alternative interpretation of grace expressed in Michelangelo's art.” Both Colonna and her friend and spiritual traveler Michelangelo decisively reject the “kind of grace espoused by Castiglione and Bembo and perfected by Raphael and Ariosto, cultivating instead an image of the artist as hardworking and intense,” one that “promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God's gift,” reminding us all the while that its origin is in God alone and mysteriously bestowed upon those he chooses (28).

Not all literati and artists embraced these views of grace in the same ways. A poet like Lodovico Ariosto, author of Orlando furioso (1532), though in many ways akin to Castiglione and Raphael, as his biographer Lodovico Dolce maintains, could playfully, if not annoyingly, tease readers with his subtleties on grace, which all the more gives evidence of its chameleon-like nuances and paradoxes. The word with its protean notions will live on, as Mac Carthy demonstrates in Torquato Tasso's Il malpiglio (1585), with his “retrospective nostalgia for a long-lost grace,” and in Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women) (1592). Both illuminate the steadfast resilience of grace to remain inflexibly plural in a world subject to profound change.