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| Anonymous Italian artist Man with dagger 19th century drawing British Museum |
"Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is. Like Sappho's adjective glukupikron, the moment of desire is one that defies proper edge, being a compound of opposites forced together at pressure. Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole."
– from Eros the Bittersweet : an essay by Anne Carson (Princeton University Press, 1986)
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| Auguste Rodin Embracing figures 19th century drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Constantin Guys Woman with parasol 19th century drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Eugène Delacroix Oriental women 1835 drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Paul Gavarni Seated woman 19th century drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art (gift of Louisine Havemeyer) |
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| Édouard Manet Berthe Morisot 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| François Joseph Navez Académie early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Figure with staff early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Figure study early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Study from the antique early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Bent figure early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Crouching figure asleep early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Reclining figure early 19th century drawing British Museum |
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| William Hilton Foreshortened figure early 19th century drawing British Museum |