Soulscape 33, The Three Graces by Carpeaux

From My Upcoming Book: Soulscape: The Many Ways Art Transforms Us

Carpeaux, The Three Graces, 1868, terracotta. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris. WC.

Art Reveals the Joy of the Human Spirit

The Three Graces is a terracotta sculpture, half life-size, of three nude young women standing with their fingers intertwined, engaging in dance. Their heads are tilted, with two of them having broad, infectious smiles. Their bodies, from head to toe, are flawlessly proportioned, and though finished down to their details, their skin has a warm, fresh, peach-like texture.

Two outstanding technical features of this sculpture are their brilliant smiles and the complex composition of three figures interwoven, integrated as a group, and linked by their hands delicately touching.

Broad smiles in art are notoriously difficult to do. Rembrandt turned a smile of a young man unintentionally into a grimace, and da Vinci, in his Benois Madonna, had her smile through gritted teeth. Carpeaux, by contrast, gave their heads a lilting tilt and used the muscles of the whole face to support a spontaneous-looking smile. Seriously, you could look through art history and only find a handful of sculptures or paintings of people with expansive, parted-lips smiles that work and don’t look like the grim reaper.

When you add the techniques of proportions, body language, the 3D integration of human forms in space, and spot-on touching of their hands, you have a masterpiece of engineering on an epic scale. I am reminded of Elon Musk recently making history by docking a returning spaceship. Similarly, their hands are perfectly “docked” after our eyes have traveled through a universe of human proportions and psychological expression. Indeed, with art, the technical mastery is merely a means to an end: the spirit of the piece. Hence, most people don’t focus on the engineering marvel of great artworks—it just looks natural to them.

The theme of joyous sisterhood brings to mind Aristotle's concept of eudaemonia—happiness as a moment of pure joy and an end in itself. Included in his concept is that it is the result of a realistic and ethically well-lived life. In The Three Graces, Carpeaux captures this unblemished joy, free from negativity, in a moment of unselfconscious celebration of the joy of the human spirit.

Soulscape: The Many Ways Art Transforms Us