Jealousy in art deals with the way writers and graphic artists have approached the topic of jealousy in their works.

Jealousy is the powerful complex of emotions experienced at the loss, real or imagined, of something or someone you believe is yours, whereas envy concerns what you don’t have and would like to possess. Othello is filled with jealousy at the thought of losing Desdemona: Iago is consumed with envy of Othello’s prestige. Because jealous lovers tell multiple stories about those who arouse their jealousy, and because the emotion is so corrosive, jealousy is a common theme in literature and art, not to mention opera and cinema.

Literature

Literary works use a variety of devices to explore its possibilities and reveal its wider implications. Most famously, perhaps, in the 1001 Nights Schahriar’s destructive jealousy is what precipitates Scheherazade’s creative outpouring of stories. In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso

Orlando Furioso

Orlando Furioso is an Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto which has exerted a wide influence on later culture. The earliest version appeared in 1516, although the poem was not published in its complete form until 1532...

(1516) jealousy leads to such a distortion of the world that the sufferer is driven to madness. Shakespeare's later play, the Winters tale (1613) is predominately about the jealousy felt by Leontes' and his supposed adulterous wife. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla (1821) is more concerned with the interplay between jealousy and the theater, between reality and masks. In Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...

’s Villette (1853) jealousy becomes a game of reflections and speculations, a potent denial of sexual stereotypes, and, like many novels written by women, an angry rejection of the violation of the individual caused by the gaze of the jealous lover. Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire...

 uses both He Knew He Was Right (1869) and Kept in the Dark (1882) to analyze not only double standards used to judge how men and women behave but also the relationship between mind and body. Tolstoy

Tolstoy

Tolstoy, or Tolstoi is a prominent family of Russian nobility, descending from Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy who served under Vasily II of Moscow...

’s The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata

The Kreutzer Sonata is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1889 and promptly censored by the Russian authorities. The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage...

(1889) offers a compelling exploration of jealousy acting as a front for repressed homosexuality

Homosexuality

Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), especially the section concerning Albertine, represents the claustrophobic nature of the passion of jealousy through the tropes of imprisonment, illness and death, while Michal Choromanski’s Jealousy and Medicine (1932) creates a landscape and a climate that recreate to the full the physical experience of jealousy. Freud’s reading of jealousy and his emphasis on repetitive structures inspires Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...

’s A Word Child (1975) in which the London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 subway symbolizes endless repetition of the same.

Other novelists have used jealousy to explore the relationship between writer and reader, as well as that between fiction and reality. Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...

’s Jealousy (1965) develops the image of the window blind (in French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 “la jalousie” means both the emotion and the window blind) to lock the reader into the jealous person’s mind, while in Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer, and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for his book The Sense of an Ending...

’s Talking it Over (1991), the writer’s jealousy of the reader’s attention is as much a part of the story as the sexual jealousy it also examines. A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner...

’s Possession (1990) is in part an analysis of the ways in which writing and reading operate to silence other voices.

Graphic arts

In art, depicting a face reflecting the ravages of jealousy was a frequent studio exercise: see for instance drawings by Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun , a French painter and art theorist, became the all-powerful, peerless master of 17th-century French art.-Biography:-Early life and training:...

 (1619–1690) or Sébastien Leclerc (the Younger) (1676–1763), or in a fuller treatment, the howling figure on the left in Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (probably 1540-50). Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...

’s 1498 drawing, Hercules’s Jealousy depicts jealousy as a powerfully built woman armed with a sword. The theme of jealousy is frequently conveyed through images of the gaze as in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Paolo and Francesca (1819) which reveals the jealous husband’s gaze catching the young lovers’ first kiss. Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...

’s many depictions of jealousy, however, tend to place the husband at the front of the painting with a couple behind him as if to suggest that jealousy is created more by the mind than by the gaze. This suggestion is intensified by his cunning use of symbolic colors. There are, nevertheless, lighter moments, as when Gaston de La Touche (1854–1913), in Jealousy or the Monkey shows a love scene interrupted by a monkey tugging on the woman’s dress. While popular images of jealousy tend to the lurid, it remains a source, both in literature and in painting, of highly creative artistic strategies that have little to do with the negative and destructive sides of the emotion itself.