The Latin word for envy, invidia, comes from in-videre, "to look upon," with the sense of looking at someone with ill will. The ancients understood envy as a way of seeing, the root of the evil eye. Dante took the idea literally: in his Purgatorio, the envious sit with their eyelids sewn shut with iron wire, so the eyes that sinned are the eyes that suffer. Waterhouse's Circe Invidiosa (1892), "Circe the Envious," is a painting about that kind of looking, and about the moment it turns into action.
The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Glaucus was a mortal fisherman who became a sea-god after eating a magic herb. He fell in love with the nymph Scylla, who fled from him, so he went to Circe for a love potion. Circe fell for Glaucus herself and offered him her love instead. He refused, swearing he would love only Scylla. Circe couldn't punish a god, so she punished the girl. She poisoned the cove where Scylla bathed with herbs and incantations, and when Scylla waded in, the lower half of her body became a ring of snarling dogs. Waterhouse's painting, now in the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, doesn't show the monster. It shows the pouring, the single decisive act, and the color does the rest: a thread of acid green falling into a sea of jade. It's the same green Shakespeare gave jealousy when Iago warned Othello against "the green-eyed monster."
The story doesn't end there, and this is where it becomes something larger than a tale of spite. The monster Circe created is the same Scylla who later snatches six of Odysseus's men from his ship in the Odyssey, the very danger Circe herself warns him about before he sails. Her jealousy outlives the moment by a generation and becomes a hazard for strangers who had nothing to do with it. Keats saw the richness of this corner of myth too, and gave the whole Glaucus and Scylla story, with Circe as its villain, a long episode in his poem Endymion.
Painted just a year after Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, this picture shows the other side of the same woman. There she is power at ease, sure of herself and curious about you. Here she is power wounded, rejected and spending her magic on revenge. Waterhouse doesn't make her a gloating villain. She looks down at her work absorbed, almost sorrowful, as though she already knows she's poisoning more than the water.
That's why the painting lands so hard now. Envy has never had more fuel than in an age of constant comparison, other people's lives arriving on a screen all day long. Ovid's lesson is uncomfortably exact. Envy transforms the person it's aimed at, but it transforms the one who feels it first, and what it releases into the water doesn't stay where it was poured.
Waterhouse's Circe Invidiosa appears on our: