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In 1600 Ben Jonson wrote the following commendatory lines on Nicholas Breton’s Melancholike Humours, a volume of “verses of diverse natures”: Look here on Breton’s work, the master print, Where such perfections to the life do rise. If they seem wry to such as look asquint The fault’s not in the object, but their eyes. Ungathered Verse, 2.5–8)1 Worrying, as ever, about the waywardness of popular judgment, Jonson declares that if Breton’s readers cannot see the beauties of his work, then the blame must lie not with the work, but with the readers themselves: they are simply not observing it aright, but looking sideways, “asquint.” To look sideways was to look enviously or maliciously or askance, with a disapproving, and hence a distorting, gaze. In the most sinister construction, it was to cast an evil eye, which had power to diminish and ultimately to destroy the victim.2 This kind of sideways looking, it was imagined, made both the viewer and the person viewed unusually thin. One of the shepherds in Virgil’s third eclogue worries about the leanness of his lambs which he imagines someone must have been observing in just this manner: nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos, he says: “I don’t know what evil eye bewitches my lambs” (103). In the second book of the Metamorphoses Ovid offers an elaborate description of the figure of Invidia or Envy as a grotesque female with a pale face, a lean and wasted body, decayed teeth, bad breath, a venomous tongue, and a terrible squint. She looks obliquo, sideways (787). Envy was regularly depicted in this manner in the Renaissance handbooks which Jonson is known to have studied, such as Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. Snakes swarm from her head, as she attempts, disgustingly, to devour her own heart, while her eyes roll ominously to one side.3 A still more terrible picture of the consequences of envy is offered in canto 13 of the Purgatorio, where Dante and Virgil encounter a crowd of blind folk standing about dejectedly in sackcloth. Peering more closely, Dante sees that their eyelids have been stitched together with a metallic thread. These people have been judged guilty of the sin of envy, of having looked balefully and malevolently at the prosperity of others; they have now suffered the ultimate and appropriate punishment, and cannot look at anything at all.
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