ABSTRACT
Buildings implode against the New York sky, a strange pall of darkness cloaks the city that never sleeps. New York stands for a blinding moment. The city loses sight momentarily. Walking against the rubble of life erased, a stark light exposes the past of downtown Manhattan. Envy unravels at the crossroads of desire and empire, economics and conquest, need and greed, cosmologies and theologies. James of Vitry, a renowned preacher writing in the beginning of the thirteenth-century France, was imbued with the spirit of the crusades and was greatly dismayed by the replacement of the crusades with the tournaments of knights as entertainment. To him, invidia is the sin of peasants and paupers that transcends class. The bloodlettings of history are filled with the envious inscriptions of painters, poets, historians and chroniclers. A great scene of covetous desire illustrates Eugène Delacroix’s diaries recording his travels to Morocco and Algeria.
