Love, sex and lust. Images of desire in Spanish Romanticism

Abstract

This article focuses on six items where desire becomes an issue of representa­tion: love as a spiritual state, love as a joyful and hopeful longing, moral and dis­comfort of passion, images of sexual violence, representations of prostitution and sex as pleasure. In general, desire is identified in a metonymic way: we recognize it through his consequences in human behavior. In this regard, Spanish artists during the Romantic period are more concerned in actions, related to history and literature, than individual experiences from real.