I used to think that grace belonged only to the church. It was a word whispered from pulpits and sung in hymns, tethered to salvation and forgiveness, its weight measured in theology. But standing before Luigi Lucioni’s The Three Graces (1949), I see another kind of grace—one rooted in bark and field, one that bends with the wind and shines in the afternoon sun. Here grace is not confined to doctrine but becomes a living dance, as old as the Greeks and as immediate as the Vermont countryside.
In the foreground, three birch trees rise, white and slender, their trunks scarred yet radiant. They lean toward one another like dancers in mid-turn, caught in a moment of perpetual movement. These are Lucioni’s Graces: Aglaea, Euphrosyne, Thalia—not marble maidens from antiquity but living pillars, grounded and luminous. Behind them stretches a green expanse, rolling toward the distant hills. And there, small but insistent, a church steeple pierces the horizon. The Graces and the steeple, nature and the sanctuary, the gods and God: all are drawn into the same composition, a choreography of presence.
The ancients said the Graces never stood still. In Pindar’s words, “Without the Graces, there is no pleasure, nor dancing, nor love; but they give charm to all things that are lovable” (Olympian Odes). Their gift was never meant to be hoarded; it flowed outward, multiplying as it was shared. Grace was not a possession but a circulation, like water or light. And here, in Lucioni’s birches, that ancient truth returns. Their bark peels like drapery, their forms lean toward one another, their presence a reminder that beauty is not singular but communal.
Yet beyond them, the church spire rises—solemn, vertical, a symbol of Christian grace. Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” The steeple, sharp against the sky, is that flame made architectural, pointing heavenward, insisting that grace descends from above. Its presence does not cancel the Graces, nor do they overshadow it. Instead, the two visions—pagan and Christian, myth and doctrine—exist together in harmony. The birches embody grace as immanent, spilling out of earth and sky; the church gestures toward transcendence, the grace of God given freely.
Thomas Merton wrote that “grace is everywhere, as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.” Seen this way, the painting becomes a fusion: the white trunks turning toward one another, the steeple piercing the heavens, each in movement toward the other. Perhaps Lucioni intuited that grace cannot be captured by a single tradition. It is both the joy of the dance and the solemnity of prayer, both gift and blessing, both ancient and ever new.
Perhaps this is what the painting whispers: that the past and the present, nature and religion, the gods and God, are not adversaries but partners in a greater dance. The birches sway in their eternal circle; the steeple points upward in its stillness. Each calls the other into balance. And in that harmony I glimpse something true: that grace is not just what descends from heaven, nor only what rises from earth, but what emerges when past and present, myth and faith, body and spirit move together.
The dance continues.