Advanced Composition and Conversation:

Undergraduate

Performing Grace: Premodern Bodies from Dante to Michelangelo and Beyond. What made a body beautiful in Italy before the modern age? Who defined grace – and what was considered ugly, excessive, or even dangerous? This course explores how bodies were imagined, admired, disciplined, and displayed in Italy from Dante to the eighteenth century. Moving between poetry and painting, we examine how love sonnets shaped ideals of beauty, how portraits fashioned identity, and how clothing and nudity expressed power, devotion, and desire. We encounter Petrarch’s Laura, Michelangelo’s monumental nudes, Titian’s sensual figures, warrior women like Clorinda, and saints who punished their own bodies. Along the way, we consider how ideals of masculinity and femininity were performed and how art and literature together defined what counted as “grace.” Working closely with rare books at the Beinecke Library and paintings and drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, we discover how premodern Italy created some of the most influential ideals of beauty in Western culture – ones that still shape how we see bodies today. Prerequisite: ITAL 140 or equivalent. L5 TTh 9am-10:15am