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J. Ruskin, in his book The Stones of Venice, describes Envy as depicted by Giotto amongst the others vices and virtues in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova:
Giotto has, however, represented her, with still greater subtlety, as having her fingers terminating in claws, and raising her right hand with an expression partly of impotent regret, partly of involuntary grasping; a serpent, issuing from her mouth, is about to bite her between her eyes: she has long membranous ears, horns on her head and flames consuming her body.
I will not attempt a detailed analysis of Giotto's impressive representation of this allegorical figure, which is the most complex of all and the only one not painted in monochrome. Suffice it to say that it seems to describe the ultimate, most destructive attack, namely the attack on one's own self, the perceiving self (the snake which tries to bite between the eyes). Also relevant to Envy and Gratitude Revisited is the fact that Giotto, unlike Klein, contrasts Envy with Caritas, the catholic virtue equated with Love (by Saint Paul and Saint Augustine).
Priscilla Roth, in her beautiful introduction to this book, gives a summary of the content, eliciting the various themes running through it and linking the relevant ideas. I will therefore just give my own impressions of each contribution.
I will start with Ron Britton's paper, He thinks himself impaired: The pathological envious personality. This is a scholarly paper in which Britton uses Milton's description of Satan in Paradise Lost and Trollope's character Mr Reverend Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset (Trollope, 1867) to describe the complexity of what he calls ‘the triad of pride, despair and envy’. In the opening of the paper he tries to follow the development of the concept of Envy from Abraham, through Klein up to the present and also, most interestingly, in various religions, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Britton makes the connection to the contrast in Catholic cat