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This article sketches the archetypes and various figures of the ballerina who embodied, in literary works and on the stage, the deep cultural tensions awakened by women dancing in public in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis explores the gap between the normative image described in the manuals written by dancing masters and the figures of the ballerina that emerge from other sources, including from the controversy of theatre. Combining dance studies and gender studies, this work looks at the corporeality, the movement, and the expressive and seductive power of the female dancing body displayed in public, in order to understand the relationship between the physical effect on spectators and the cultural representations those spectators inherit and transmit.