The project is focused on the discussion of inner beauty that blossomed in the eighteenth century. The initial point is the updating of the ancient kalokagathia, used in the discussion on grace from Hogarth, Mendelssohn, Winckelmann, Wieland and Lessing up to Schiller and Kleist. Whereas in ancient times, in the Renaissance and in French Classicism the idea of grace was meant to be an expression of aristocratic nonchalance and gallant conversation, in the Age of Enlightenment grace turns into a specific form of physical movement as a spiritual expression of soulful emotions. These graceful gestures are based on the expression of modesty as a sign of natural morality and virtue. This increasing influence of concepts of modesty and shame on the discussion about inner beauty refers back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of modern civilisation. Via Rousseau, the aristocratic meaning of grace as nonchalance, or sprezzatura, as well as the frivolous play of amorous dalliance common in the first half of the century (as with Wieland) is replaced by the civic meaning of grace as an expression of purity and innocence: These are the new ideals of the graceful beauty of the soul.

Notwithstanding the rousseauistic idea of naturalness, this new connection of shame and grace reveals the typical mechanisms of a civilizing process (Norbert Elias). The paradox of this process – the internalization of aristocratic grace will ultimately be understood as the "original-natural" beauty of the bourgeoisie – could be analyzed by focussing on bourgeois theater (Bürgerliches Trauerspiel) as a "theater of chastity" (Christopher J. Wild). In the bourgeois theater, the rousseauistic idea of a “nature of women” (Sylvia Bovenschen) becomes the most important model of the bourgeois heroine. The beautiful souls of bourgeois tragedy end up as icons of virtue, but mainly tragic: They are betrayed by the nobility or commit a voluntary kind of suicide, a sacrifice. It is a paradoxical development: The bourgeoisie imitates and internalizes the aristocratic idea of grace, which results in a certain political blockade: The dramatic impossibility of rebellion against the arbitrary rules of the aristocracy.