Favorite Women of Art #7: Portrait of a Woman Holding a Fan--Goya (1807) I really love her.

If I had lived in this age and been of a rank anywhere comparable to this woman (and the skills of manhood commensurate with that rank) and she had come into my acquaintance, I can't imagine anything that could have prevented me from making some attempt on her virtue. If she were already married? Inconvenient, but then what were all those hours with the fencing master in boyhood spent for, after all? This is not mere ego-gratification or animal lust(though naturally it partakes heavily of both those qualities, as it must), this is Western European post-classical romantic idealized heterosexual love that pierces me through the breast. But why? Because she is half my own self, you fool, and while she may not need me as a lover (it does not follow that I am so fully half her own self--the math is complicated, but necessary to understand), she does need me in some capacity to achieve her own completion.