Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. THE FLETCHER JONES FOUNDATION HUMANITIES IMPRINT Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. The Fletcher Jones Foundation has endowed this imprint to foster innovative and enduring scholarship in the humanities. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Venice Incognito Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Venice Incognito Masks in the Serene Republic Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. James H. Johnson Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Portions of this book appeared previously in different form and are printed here by permission of their original publishers: James H. Johnson, “Deceit and Sincerity in Early-Modern Venice,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 399–415. © 2005 by The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. James H. Johnson, “Useful Myths in the Nineteenth Century: Venice in Opera,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, no. 3 (2006): 533–554. It is included herein with the permission of the editors of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, © 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, James H., 1960– Venice incognito : masks in the serene republic / James H. Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-26771-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Venice (Italy)—History—1508–1797. 2. Masks—Italy—Venice—History. 3. Venice (Italy)—Social life and customs. I. Title. DG678.4.J65 2011 945’.31107—dc22 2010036097 Manufactured in the United States of America Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. For Lydia Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Contents List of Illustrations Preface PART ONE. THE CARNIVAL OF VENICE 1. Casanova’s Carnival 2. New World 3. Even Odds 4. Blood Sport 5. Fat Thursday 6. Anything Goes? Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. PART TWO. THE CULTURE OF MASKING 7. City of Masks 8. Infernal Associations 9. Devil’s Dance 10. Unmasking the Heart 11. Age of Dissimulation PART THREE. THE HONEST MASK 12. Legislating Morality Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. 13. Saving Face 14. Venetian Incognito 15. Democratizing Dress 16. Taming the Devil PART FOUR. CARNIVAL AND COMMUNITY 17. Redeemed by the Blood 18. Carnival Tales 19. The Mask of Sincerity 20. Carnival Contained 21. Bitter Ash Epilogue: After the Fall Notes Bibliography Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Acknowledgments Photo Credits Index Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Illustrations 1. Couple in Venetian tabàro and baùta 2. Woman wearing morèta 3. Giacomo Casanova in his sixty-third year 4. Giandomenico Tiepolo, The Minuet 5. Pietro Longhi, The Rhinoceros 6. Venetian carnival 7. Cross-dressing in carnival: Venetian gnaga 8. Francesco Guardi, The Ridotto 9. A bull “thrown” by handlers Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. 10. Masked Venetian 11. Arlecchino 12. Pulcinella 13. Domenico Fetti, Portrait of an Actor 14. Triumphal arch, Brussels 15. Fraud 16. Sincerity 17. The Word of an Honest Man Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. 18. Loyalty 19. Mendacity 20. Lorenzo Lippi, Woman Holding a Mask and a Pomegranate 21. Salvator Rosa, Philosopher Showing a Mask to Another Person 22. Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait 23. Masked beggar 24. Venetian engaged to be married 25. Spectators buying tickets outside theater 26. Venetian noble in winter dress 27. Venetian noble in winter dress (detail) 28. Masked ambassadors at banquet in ducal palace Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. 29. Carlo Goldoni 30. Carlo Gozzi 31. Giandomenico Tiepolo, At the Leopard’s Cage 32. Pulcinella Swaddled in His Crib 33. Burial of Pulcinella 34. Birth of Pulcinella 35. Frontispiece, Divertimenti per li regazzi 36. Pulcinella Arrested Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. 37. Pulcinella in Prison 38. Pulcinella before the Tribunal 39. Pulcinella’s Farewell to Venice 40. At the Lion’s Cage 41. Pulcinellas Bring Down a Tree 42. Tavern Scene 43. Tavern Scene, 1791 44. Execution by Firing Squad 45. Jacques Callot, The Firing Squad 46. Death by Hanging 47. Station 8, Stations of the Cross 48. Station 9, Stations of the Cross 49. Station 7, Stations of the Cross Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. 50. Scourging of Pulcinella 51. Frontispiece, Stations of the Cross 52. Pulcinella’s Tomb Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Preface I came to this book as many others have come to Venice, drawn in by carnival. I wanted to know what masks tell us about the people who wear them, and Venice seemed like the place to start. Masking there dates back to the thirteenth century. At the height of its carnival, five hundred years later, Venice attracted revelers from across the globe who were eager to change their names and trade their titles for the mask’s anonymity. The season also drew smugglers, con men, prostitutes, and thieves, who had their own motives for disguise. Carnival’s attractions mixed all social ranks in close quarters: in the city’s cafés and gambling dens, in its theaters for music and comedy, before the outdoor stalls of hawkers and touts, and along the crowded lanes around Piazza San Marco. What better setting in which to see the mask’s transformations? Venice appealed to me for another reason. Most agree that carnival freed its revelers from inhibitions and caused them to act on impulse. Consensus calls the effect topsy-turvy, a mad jumble that upended hierarchy and defied mores. In such a view, the Venetian Casanova’s jubilant hedonism prefigures a later age. For many, the thought of a happy, tolerant population willing to suspend convention shows Venetians to have been ahead of their time. Might we find sources of the modern self in this carnival city? Did their celebrations reveal human nature freed from social constraint? As I read more, I learned a surprising fact. Starting in the late seventeenth century, Venetians wore masks in public for six months of the year, a practice they continued until the Republic’s fall in 1797. Visitors assumed that carnival had begun to spill into other seasons, driven by a population intent on pleasure. Modern scholars echo that conclusion. But the activities of these maskers were not especially festive. Patricians and diplomats wore masks to solemn receptions and state ceremonies, foreign princes came to the meetings of learned societies in masks, spectators watched plays and heard operas wearing masks, masked patrons came to cafés for conversation. Understanding why Venetians wore masks in public for more than a century affects how we view their experience of carnival. It also opens avenues that bear little ostensible relevance to the season. The practice grew from a culture in which secrecy was prized and self-revelation not always prudent. It carried traces of a political arrangement that combined exclusive patrician rule with an unchanging Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. social hierarchy. Just as courtly settings elsewhere shaped an identifying etiquette to guide relations, Venetian republicanism produced its own patterns of dress and behavior to smooth transactions in the public sphere. For commerce among unequals, the mask became an essential article. Masks were the public face of Venice in the eighteenth century. They were also present in less visible ways. Intellectuals spoke of “honest dissimulation,” which called a partial truth—as opposed to a half-lie—morally justified. Artists depicted allegorical masks both to condemn and to recommend, with connotations that went far beyond the mere deceit or disguise that modern misreadings see. Women masked their faces with veils, which granted liberty under the guise of protecting modesty. Beggars whose identities were known wore masks to hide their shame. When an economic crisis opened gaping disparities among elites, they still clung to a tradition of identical dress to mask the inequality. In early modern Venice, masks served purposes that did not depend on anonymity. Their use defies modern notions that identify masks with deception or a mocking rejection of hierarchy. Masking in Venice was more often conservative, preserving distance, guarding status, and permitting contact among unequals through fictive concealment. Rather than obscuring identities, masks affirmed their permanence. Venice Incognito opens with carnival but looks beyond it to reframe some common assumptions. Did carnival truly free revelers from their social roles? Did it grant them license to mock their superiors and shed their inhibitions? Did the mask actually disguise maskers? To ask such questions with the mask’s wider associations in mind exposes currents that are not especially forward-looking, including Venetians’ self-policing against unruly revelers, the heavy presence of the state in scripting celebrations that foreigners often took as spontaneous, and the considerable violence that accompanied carnival. Carnival’s wider context casts serious doubt on judgments that have linked the Republic’s supposedly pervasive frivolity to its decline and fall. The interplay between the mask’s two sides—its function in particular settings and its more abstract invocation by writers, moralists, and deceivers—has shaped the structure of Venice Incognito. The book’s twenty-one short chapters are by turns historical and thematic, sketching a broad chronology while occasionally skipping forward and back in time. Vignettes display masks in their many settings: in carnival and commedia dell’arte, among foreign sovereigns visiting the city “incognito” and the local nobles who received them, as rhetorical figures to dissemble the beliefs of those threatened or oppressed, as a tool of “sincerity” used by con men and seducers, and as allegorical features of paintings and drawings intended to warn, counsel, or, in the case of the Venetian artist Giandomenico Tiepolo, pay sad tribute to this city of masks after its defeat by Napoleon. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. How past generations have viewed the relationship between appearance and essence—whether the mask of manners is a blessing or a bane—says much about changing ideas of the self. The Venetian intellectual Gasparo Gozzi, convinced that humans were neither equal nor naturally sociable, praised conventions of courtesy as so many “masks, veils, fictions, appearances.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by contrast, lamenting the corruptions of civilized society, used the language of masks to deplore the sway of appearances. “The man of the world is wholly his mask,” he wrote. “What he is, is nothing.” Just over a century later, Oscar Wilde reversed the formula and quipped that man was least himself when he talked in his own person. “Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”1 Scholars from several disciplines have written about the promise and limits of altering one’s identity in attempts to chart the historical development of selfhood. The literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt traces the roots of modern identity as a “manipulable, artful process” to poems, plays, and religious tracts from the Renaissance. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis locates novel efforts in early modern Europe to forge coherent narratives of the self in cases of imposture and the self-defense of accused criminals. The philosopher Charles Taylor recounts the rise of modern varieties of inwardness and individuality through major works of philosophy, which narrate a greater and greater freedom to shape one’s own identity.2 Venice Incognito aims to ground these large themes in the lived experience of a particular population. It approaches such changes by enlarging the evidence from case histories and classic works of literature and philosophy to shared beliefs and practices. The book ends with the modern imperative of self-creation still out of reach for most Venetians. The chilling fate of a failed impostor named Tomaso Gerachi, who was expert in counterfeiting nobility, reminds us that in eighteenthcentury Venice there were strict limits to fashioning the self. Masks are a continuing presence in the evolution of selfhood. From the early modern period to our own time, they have gone from marking and reinforcing a hierarchy in which alternative identities were scarcely conceivable, to helping wearers see themselves in other social roles, to standing as an unsettling symbol for freely forged but existentially uncertain identities. From where we stand, somewhere near the end of this sequence, it is hard to imagine masks as doing anything other than questioning identity. Venice Incognito tells a different story. To have a good view of masks from an earlier age, we need to set aside our own. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. PART ONE Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. The Carnival of Venice Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. CHAPTER 1 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Casanova’s Carnival Casanova celebrated carnival year-round. Where there was revelry, there was Casanova. Where there was gambling into the night, there was Casanova. Where there were freethinking women and frothing champagne, there, too, was Casanova. The neglected son of a small-time actress, Giacomo Casanova embraced every form of disguise this city of masks had to offer. What began as bluster and luck—posing as physician to a decrepit senator named Bragadin, whose gondola he was sharing when the old man suffered a stroke—became for Casanova a lifelong masquerade. Bragadin recovered, grew convinced that Casanova had saved his life, and more or less adopted him. A reckless gambler unafraid of the high-stakes lie, Casanova had struck it rich. Before his big break, Casanova had earned his wages as a mediocre fiddler in a pit orchestra. Now he had the means to transform his roots. “I hate deceit,” Casanova confides to readers in his sprawling History of My Life.1 The truth was that his life consisted of little else. He traveled under assumed names—Farusi, Vetturi—before eventually settling on Seingalt and bestowing upon himself the honorific title of chevalier. He changed his wardrobe to suit his serial selves, from a priest’s cassock, to the fussy ornaments of rings, medals, ribbons, and watch-chains, to a soldier’s uniform that matched that of no known army. He duped patrons with sham numerology and black magic, forged currency, and brought scores of women to bed with the claim that each was the greatest love of his life. The same supreme confidence that had convinced Bragadin earned Casanova private audiences with kings and philosophers: with Frederick the Great, Louis XV, and the Empress Catherine of Russia; with Pope Clement XIII, who granted him membership in the Order of the Holy Spur; and with Rousseau and Voltaire. By the prime of his life, the Chevalier de Seingalt had successfully erased his past. Tall, dark-skinned, and muscular, highly polite and even a touch pedantic, oldfashioned in his politics, a gifted storyteller, credulous about the incredible but in religious matters a skeptic, Casanova was a force to be reckoned with. Yet by his own telling, his will had little to do with his rise. On the contrary. It was seldom clear to this master of improvisation what the next step would be. Nor should it have been. “We are but thinking atoms, which move where the wind drives them,” Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. he wrote. “Hence anything important that happens to us in this world is only what is bound to happen to us.”2 This is a startling sentiment for someone who defied his origins to move in the highest circles. Following the script of eighteenthcentury materialism—a philosophy that likened thought to the careening ricochet of billiard balls—Casanova resigned his life’s authorship to Fate. He accordingly undertook to maximize pleasure, minimize loss, and draw whatever lessons, moral or otherwise, his senses might teach. An encounter with the fifteen-year-old Rosalie, a pious chambermaid in an Avignon brothel, gives him occasion to reflect on ultimate truths. “She devoured me with kisses, and, in short, she made me happy; and since in this life nothing is real except the present, I enjoyed it, dismissing the images of the past and loathing the darkness of the always dreadful future, for it offers nothing certain except death, ultima linea rerum.“3 If you asked any foreigner in eighteenth century to describe Venetian carnival, you would likely hear words that applied to Giacomo Casanova, too. It was about forgetting the past and suspending the future, escaping behind the blankness of the mask, minding the muse of pleasure. Carnival, the reveler might continue, was about transforming the self. It is therefore no surprise that on the last day of carnival, 1754, Casanova was behind a mask, having the time of his life. He would later write that this was one of his happiest moments. Not long before, he had begun an affair with the nun M. M. Her convent was on Murano, the small clump of islands in the lagoon known principally for glassmaking. There was to be a dance in the parlor for the entertainment of the ladies, who were now beginning to gather behind the latticed screens. The scene was improbable, as clowns, peasants, Turks, and pirates spilled out of gondolas in a headlong scramble for the holy ground. Some took inspiration from commedia dell’arte. In his Pierrot costume, Casanova was, as usual, going against the grain. The figure was French, not Italian, a docile simpleton who serenades by moonlight. Casanova wore a baggy white tunic, with loose sleeves and trousers that touched his heels. A large hat covered his ears, and a gauze mask hid his eyes and nose. Provided one wasn’t a hunchback or lame, Casanova said, there was no costume better suited for disguise. Not even an intimate would recognize him. With the ball now at full tilt, Casanova watched as M. M. and the other nuns laughed at him. He danced with clumsy abandon, keeping to Pierrot’s character as a boob, blundering through the room, suddenly falling asleep and waking with a start, crashing into other maskers and bumped roughly in return. A nimble Harlequin chased him and, from nowhere, a Punch tripped him hard. Casanova grabbed a leg, wrestled Punch to the floor, and knocked his false hump loose. The crowd cheered, and Casanova streaked from the convent and jumped into a waiting gondola, which took him to the churning sea of revelers in Pizza San Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Marco. Shrove Tuesday in Venice, martedì grasso, marked the end of the popular celebrations with balls, dinners, and spontaneous dancing in the narrow alleys and packed public squares. The city’s official celebration was the previous Thursday, giovedì grasso, when maskers of every social class assembled near the basilica and a procession of government officials marched onto the balcony of the ducal palace. Together they watched the same scripted events that Venetians standing in that very spot had seen each giovedì grasso for nearly half a millennium. Acrobats risked death on ropes overhead, sword dancers leapt and tumbled, wooden castles were destroyed with clubs, and bulls were beheaded. The final fling came on Tuesday. Maskers poured into the piazza and along the Zattere to dance with strangers. The winding route between San Stefano and St. Mark’s was clogged and virtually impassable. Shrove Tuesday was also the last night of the season for the city’s theaters, which staged their best works, hoping for a sellout. Gamblers spilled out of their dens and into the streets, settling scores, nursing wounds, trying to get home safely with their gains. Inside the overcrowded cafés, where the roar grew deafening and the heat was stifling, breathing under the mask was a labor. As Casanova slipped back to Venice in the waning hours of this martedì grasso, he had cause to smile about his disguise. Now fully into his affair with M. M., there was still the problem of C. C., another nun at the convent. She, too, had been watching from behind the grate and had laughed at his antics.4 Five months earlier, C. C.’s father had sent her to the convent. She was fourteen and, with the help of a mask, had gone on long walks with Casanova throughout the city, to the opera, to the gambling hall, and eventually to a rented room on the narrow strip of land called the Guidecca. Casanova had assured her that they were married “before God.” Asking her father for her hand was a mere formality, he had said. Casanova didn’t get the chance. Suddenly C. C. found herself behind the convent’s walls, and with that Casanova found religion, joining a handful of lay worshipers in the order’s small chapel in hopes of glimpsing her. It was during his pilgrimage that M. M. noticed him. One evening as Casanova boarded his gondola for Venice, a note was dropped at his feet proposing that he come to the parlor in a mask. Two days later, he was on his way back to Murano in a spacious two-oared vessel with a Countess S., named in the note as a confidant of its author. Both were masked; they spoke of the weather. Casanova could scarcely contain himself. What could the note’s farewell—it was signed “your loving friend”—possibly signify? Did she know the real reason for his piety? Casanova remained masked as they sat down before the screen. When the countess asked for the nun by name, he was astounded by its eminence. Casanova Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. studied M. M. as the women talked. She did not once look in his direction. M. M. was a perfect beauty, he would write, noble and shy, with two rows of magnificent teeth, chestnut eyebrows, and moist lips. “Sure that I should possess her in a few days, I enjoyed the pleasure of paying her the tribute of desiring her.” Furtive notes followed, carried by surrogates. The two met, first at the grate and later at a small apartment nearby. Casanova eventually learned that the rooms belonged to the French ambassador, François de Bernis. A favorite at Versailles, the abbé de Bernis was posted to the city in 1752 with instructions to take special note of what lessons the Serenissima’s steady decline (“decadence” was the word the ministers had used) held for France. “The Republic has suffered the sad effects of an ambition that may well exhaust its resources and bring about its utter ruin,” the brief read.5 Diplomats were already saying what is now conventional wisdom: that the catastrophic loss of southern Greece to the Ottoman Turks thirty-five years earlier, formalized in the Treaty of Passarowitz, had sealed the fate of this oncegreat empire. Venice would henceforth be an observer, and not a broker, of world events. De Bernis’s work did not prevent him from tasting the city’s pleasures. Soon after his arrival, he acquired a mistress of elevated birth and furnished their love nest, the casino (little house) on Murano, with the latest styles. This was a luxury cultivated by the wealthiest Venetians. At the time of the Republic’s fall in 1797, the authorities counted some 130 casini, the largest number of which were situated near Piazza San Marco. A pied-à-terre in one’s own city, the casino was a quiet retreat from the loud cafés: for private dinners and conversation, for politicking or plotting, and for personal business that required discretion. The government was understandably concerned about them, not only for political reasons. In the eighteenth century, it periodically closed casini for offenses against morality.6 Casanova came to know the ambassador’s casino well. It had three rooms, an ample fireplace, and a library stocked with works attacking religion, all of them from France and all forbidden. The ambassador kept a collection of pornographic engravings, which included Gervaise de Latouche’s Portier des Chartreux and the Elegantiae latini sermonis of Johannes Meursius. Only after numerous visits to the apartment, and the bouts of athletic lovemaking they inevitably brought, did Casanova learn of one additional extravagance. Just off the main room was a secret alcove that permitted de Bernis to watch his guests through small holes drilled into the ornate woodwork. The ambassador had been a silent witness to their sessions, M. M. informed Casanova, and he hoped to see more. The revelation led Casanova to find a casino of his own, which he rented through the English ambassador’s former cook. It was already furnished “for the sake of love, good food, and every kind of pleasure.” It included a bedroom, a dressing room, and an English-style water closet. A revolving dumbwaiter Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. connected the main room to the kitchen so that meals could be enjoyed without seeing one’s servants. There was a grand marble fireplace, a large chandelier, and mirrors set at propitious angles. Coupling nudes were painted on Chinese tiles, which hung on the walls. The arrangements were worthy of a patrician, Casanova remarked. Here, as elsewhere, he was playing the part to perfection. As a Venetian, and one whose tastes ran to the forbidden in ideas as well as actions, Casanova knew that his habits strayed toward the far edge of the law. One evening as he left the Murano chapel, he saw another masker dressed in a tabàro and baùta following him. He got into a gondola bound for Venice. The masker did likewise, disembarking just behind Casanova near the Church of the Apostoli. Casanova ran him down, pressed a knife to his throat, and demanded to know what he wanted. Others approached, and the masker fled. The man was probably working for the State Inquisition, a secretive council whose army of informants brought back daily reports about who was doing what with whom. One such report, now housed in the archives of the State Inquisitors, named the patrician Marco Donà, a contemporary of Casanova’s, as a libertine, atheist, and sodomite.7 In fact, it was not long after Casanova’s affair with M. M. ended that an agent named Manuzzi feigned an interest in purchasing his books and, on the pretext of taking them to an expert for appraisal, presented the Inquisitors with the collection. Along with Ariosto, Horace, and Petrarch, there were works on magic and the Kabbalah, formulas for conjuring the devil, and a fair sampling of pornography. Casanova was imprisoned in a scorching cell beneath the roof of the ducal palace on charges of blasphemy, sorcery, and atheism. His dramatic escape fifteen months later secured his status as an international celebrity. For the rest of his days he charmed polite society all over Europe with its retelling, a performance that took approximately two hours. The tabàro and baùta, the dress of the likely agent trailing Casanova, was standard attire for eighteenth-century maskers. It consisted of an encompassing black cloak that men wore over their coats and breeches and a close-fitting hood that encircled the face and hid the neck. A white half-mask of waxed carton that extended to just below the nose was normally worn with it. The mask, or larva, was wedged against the forehead by a three-cornered hat (figure 1). Women wore the tabàro and baùta over flowing skirts. When they went hatless, they wore an oval morèta, a black mask made of velvet or lace. This they held in place by clenching a small button between their teeth, which made speaking impossible. A jewel sometimes adorned the women’s morèta, “glittering on the outside,” a traveler noted, “to accompany the Sparkling of their Eyes” (figure 2).8 The mask gave M. M. the freedom to visit Casanova outside her convent. One evening, he waited for her near the equestrian statue before the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. A masker approached, slowed, and began circling him. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Expecting to be robbed, Casanova tensed. A hand advanced—open, empty, a gesture of peace—and Casanova suddenly saw that it was M. M. in the clothes of a man, complete with breeches, tabàro and baùta, the white half-mask, and a tricorn. Her gift for disguise extended to other details. Casanova later emptied her pockets, which contained a snuffbox, a case of toothpicks, a scented handkerchief, two fine watches, and a pair of English flintlock pistols. The cook had prepared game, sturgeon, truffles, oysters, boiled eggs, and anchovies, all served on Saxon porcelain. They drank burgundy, champagne, and rum-laced punch. Volcanic lovemaking followed. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. On another visit, M. M. came dressed in a full skirt instead of breeches and wearing an oval morèta instead of the larva. The couple went to the Ridotto, Venice’s famed gambling hall near Piazza San Marco. M. M. played recklessly, unlucky at first but then winning big. Her luck drew the attention of onlookers. Nobles approached to congratulate her. Gamblers of every social class came to the Ridotto, and, apart from the barefaced patricians who held the bank at each table, most others were masked. This did not necessarily mean that identities were unknown, either to gamblers or to the Inquisitors’ agents who were fixtures in the candlelit chambers. Given M. M.’s holy vows and Casanova’s low birth, it would be unfortunate for either to be seen here in the company of the other. Casanova began to feel that they were being watched and grew increasingly uneasy. In an instant, they were out the door and moving across the dark waters in a gondola. “This is the way to escape from busy-bodies in Venice,” Casanova wrote. FIGURE 1. Couple in the Venetian tabàro and baùta Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 2. Woman wearing a morèta M. M. receives more attention than any of the roughly 120 other lovers Casanova describes in his memoirs, in large part because she was a kindred spirit. She at once embraced and rejected the reigning order, sincere in devotion but renegade in her vows. “I did not begin to love God until I had rid myself of the idea of him which religion had given me,” she says. Casanova writes that he was never sure whether she was a libertine posing as a believer or a believer posing as a libertine. He therefore calls her both. When she comes to him in her nun’s habit, she is “disguised as a saint.” When she leaves the convent surreptitiously in street clothes, she is “very well masked, as a woman.” Casanova gave the same gloss on a scene of passion with M. M. when they were still meeting in the ambassador’s casino on Murano. They tumble onto a small couch, still mostly clothed. M. M. is wearing the habit, and Casanova is in the masker’s tabàro and baùta. Such was the picture of their love, Casanova writes, “sketched out, executed in flesh and blood, and finished off by the great painter, all-wise Nature, who, inspired by love, could never paint another either truer or more interesting.”9 Such was his animating creed: the truth of the mask. Casanova’s carnival—his headlong affair with M. M. wearing masks both physical and figurative—was a telescoped version of the script he replayed in and out of season for the length of his life: embrace a role and call it the truth. Beneath all the masks was a vision of the self as tabula rasa, whose content Casanova spent his days writing, wiping clean, and rewriting. His multiple identities were true, he said, because they were his own creation. Like the pornographic literature he relished, Casanova’s memoirs exist in the perpetual present as if time never passes—a singular feat, given the more than Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. three thousand pages they comprise. It comes as a mild shock to hear mention of lovers Casanova has had fifteen years earlier, or to meet the various adolescent children he has fathered across Europe (at least one of whom he beds, to his professed ignorance). His is an autobiography told from the outside—less a bildungsroman describing growth than a picaresque tale told in ignorance of the hero’s thoughts. When Casanova describes his inner life, the effort seems contrived. “On waking in the morning I cast a summary glance at my physical and moral state, and find that I am happy; I examine my feelings, and I perceive them to be so well-justified that I do not complain of not being in control of them.”10 I do not complain of not being in control. This is not the story of a romantic hero forging his destiny in accordance with the inner self. Casanova may have been a master of self-fashioning, but his selves were successive and serial, made true despite the inconsistencies by his professed sincerity of intentions. An Epicurean who ordered his life to serve his senses, Casanova believed that humans were powerless to direct their larger course. Near the end of his memoirs he strikes a valedictory tone. “My will, far from declaring me free, was only an instrument which Fortune used to make what she would of me” (figure 3).11 Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 3. “Now comes another face of things. I seek myself, but I am not here. I am neither that which once was, nor what men judged me to be: I existed.” Giacomo Casanova in his sixty-third year. Casanova’s unbroken present-mindedness made easier his avowals of undying love, which he voiced to virtually everyone he seduced. This was more than the justification of a cad. It was tied to a self-conception unbound by fixed points of reference, status, or profession. It was intoxicating, free, and liberating, and it contributes in no small way to the tone he maintains throughout his twelvevolume life story: heedless, confident, buoyant no matter how desperate the circumstances. This was probably why he remembered the Venetian carnival of 1754, when he stepped into the baggy Pierrot costume and launched his crazy dance, as his happiest moment. On some level, he surely knew that his audacious double- Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. dealing would have to stop. Despite his avowed “freedom from prejudice,” it was his own discomfort with developments soon after this martedì grasso that caused him to end both affairs. These included M. M.’s eventual corruption of C. C., the predictable trios that followed, awkward dinners with the French ambassador, and Casanova’s late-dawning realization that he was an unwitting pawn in the grooming of C. C. for de Bernis. Besides, Casanova would soon meet a servant girl and suddenly find himself in love “as I had never been in love with any girl.”12 But all of this—the two “little houses,” the masked encounters, the gambling and fine dinners, the unease and eventual separation—was still in the future when Casanova’s gondola plowed through the waters as music and laughter receded behind him. Once in Venice, he waded through the thick crowds of revelers to come at last to the Ridotto. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. I spent two hours playing at all the small banks, going from one to another, winning, losing, indulging in all sorts of antics in complete freedom of body and soul, sure that no one recognized me, enjoying the present and snapping my fingers at the future and at all those who were pleased to exercise their reason in the dreary task of foreseeing it.13 Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. CHAPTER 2 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. New World Giandomenico Tiepolo’s painting The Minuet (figure 4) captures carnival in a moment of sheer joy. There is a riot of costumes. Giant white hats tower above a pair of Pulcinella noses. A Turk’s striped turban rises nearby. A black-masked Arlecchino holds a baton over his shoulder, and women appear in full and halfmasks. At the center a dancer in a gorgeous dress curtsies, lost in her own world and oblivious to her surroundings. She is either an actress in costume—as the lover Isabella from commedia dell’arte, for instance—or a simple girl done up for the occasion. Or maybe Tiepolo is toying with us and she really is Isabella, a makebelieve character who has stepped out of the drama and into the city’s crush. That would explain the otherworldly blankness in her eyes as she looks out at us and not at her partner, whose chunky calves and courtier’s costume make him solidly earthbound. Some in the crowd are fixed on the scene. Others are indifferent. Musicians bunched near the rear are occupied with something out of view. A girl leans in next to the legs of a massive statue. Three old men stand just behind the dancer. A coachman watches from the back of the crowd with palpable longing. Is he in costume or a hired hand working for one of the revelers? A gentlewoman watches at a slight remove from her window. In the opposite corner, a patrician with his back turned talks to a lady who might well be the dancer’s twin. She, too, gazes out frankly. Whatever fantasy world Tiepolo meant to conjure, the human sentiment he captures is real, in the excluded coachman’s gaze, in the noble-woman’s hauteur, in the bashful interest on the face of the teenager who watches from a wall in the back. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 4. Giandomenico Tiepolo, The Minuet Carnival in Venice began unofficially on December 26, when the theaters reopened after a ten-day break for Christmas. This day, St. Stephen’s, signaled the start of a steady flow of tourists, whose numbers grew over the following two months. The government decreed the official beginning of each carnival season, which varied from year to year and was relevant chiefly for knowing which hours of the day masks were permitted. The crowds were largest the week before Lent, when this inveterately private city threw open its doors and became “the hostel of graces and pleasures.”1 Carnival turned Venice into a stage and made everyone a performer. “The entire town is disguised,” a French tourist declared upon arriving.2 The performance is evident in Tiepolo’s painting, too, but the disguise is less sure: despite the masks, not all dispositions are hidden. Revelers of all ranks mingled in cafés and gambling halls, along promenades and before makeshift stages, among the freak shows, fortunetellers, soothsayers, and acrobats, all under cover of the mask. The events of the season were partly scripted and partly spontaneous, blending the ritual of centuries with improvisation. With its overlapping traditions, carnival in Venice played on several registers at once, blending violence, high hilarity, and solemn ceremony. Travelers described a topsy-turvy world, where the plebs and patricians exchanged roles, men dressed as women and women as men, and the powers that be were mocked. Behind the mask commoners were said to mix freely with nobles, women with men, and foreigners with the locals. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Maskers made nocturnal visits to convents to talk to the nuns behind screens. They flooded into cafés to talk to strangers or to gawk at the ostentatious transvestites known as gnaghe. They clogged the Ridotto, the dark, vast gambling hall near San Moisè, and mingled in the city’s renowned theaters to see plays and hear operas. At mealtime they flocked to the city’s inns and osterie for duck ragout, a carnival delicacy made from a small black fowl known locally as diavolo di mare, “devil of the sea.”3 For visitors especially, carnival was a season outside of time, when roles were suspended, taboos relaxed, and life’s practical concerns set aside. The cacophony of a hundred different sideshows reigned. There were acrobats and rope dancers, exotic animals and human monstrosities, charlatans hawking elixirs, mountebanks with their herbs and ointments, and impromptu performers of all kinds. Maskers moved from one attraction to the next. Con men thrived with their petty scams, and professional card sharks fleeced the innocent. Prostitutes knew what some sought and were eager to serve. Pickpockets worked every corner of the city. Beggars asked alms “in full maske,” an English traveler noted.4 Fortunetellers whispered their news into long pipes to emphasize its intimacy. “When they see a listener smiling,” a visitor wrote of them, “or witness some other gesture of approbation, they stop speaking for a moment and ring a small bell with marvelous gravity to show that they have just penetrated a well-hidden secret.”5 Another spoke of the terror and surprise the whispered words could bring.6 The authorities periodically warned the public about the opportunities such crowds gave predators. It was “corrupting,” the powerful Council of Ten stated. But carnival and its yearly rituals were too embedded in the city’s history for either Venetians or their visitors to be deterred.7 During carnival, Piazza San Marco was transformed into a vast cabinet of curiosities. The atmosphere had aspects of an elegant ball and a county fair. Maskers in silks and lace visited the rustic and inspected the grotesque. In 1750, a lady led a lioness through the piazza, caressing it and periodically putting her hand into its mouth. The next year a rhino was on display (figure 5). Camels, elephants, and monkeys appeared; a German displayed a miniature horse dressed in children’s clothing; heavy weights were hoisted onto the bellies of strong men. Vendors sold sweets, tooth extractors set up booths, and for twenty-five years running one Giuseppe Colombani cured “hydropsy, paralysis, gout, apoplexy, kidney stones, and phthisic.”8 Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 5. Pietro Longhi, The Rhinoceros Some displays were more edifying than others. For a fee, maskers entered an exhibit just off the square publicizing the wonders of science. It included a wax woman with her stomach opened to expose her organs, a human arm preserved in fluid, and the severed leg of a horse. In the middle of the square, a magic lantern called Mondo nuovo (New World) drew people who crowded around “as if they were mad,” as Goldoni wrote, all of them keen to see wonderful scenes of battles, regattas, ambassadors, queens, and emperors.9 A painting by Tiepolo titled Mondo nuovo casts us as the excluded outsiders as a man on a chair dangles the device before a group. We see the maskers’ backs but can’t make out what’s happening. The image exerts the same hypnotic pull that carnivalgoers must have felt at every step. Judging by contemporaries’ accounts, Tiepolo’s array of costumes in The Minuet Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. is accurate. This list comes from two eighteenth-century sources: Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Frenchmen, Turks, Indians, a Hunchback, a Highwayman, Astrologers, Necromancers, Chiromancers, Magi, a Lawyer with Cards, Philosophers, Warriors, Physicians, a Clothing-dealer, Doctors, Actors, Poets, Singers, Captains, Cavaliers, a Nun’s Servant with a Basket of Sweets, a Fisherman with a Platter of Fish, Charlatans, a Doctor with a Book, a Street-sweeper, Pulcinella with a Plate of Macaroni, Boatmen, Lackeys, a German with Pearls, a Spaniard, Perfumers, a Hebrew lamenting Carnival, the Devil, a Hunter with Birds and a Shotgun, an Old Hermit, a Gardener with a Cap, a Baker, Clowns, Quakers, a King with a Scepter, a Cavalier on a Stick-horse, Lace-sellers, Sellers of Polenta, Amazons, Moors, Soldiers, a Dancing-bear.10 Some maskers opted for plainer garb, the tabàro e baùta, which was in many ways the opposite of a costume. It was common, not individual, and its wearers were more likely to blend in than stand out. One French visitor called it the city’s “uniform,” adding that he was surprised to see that so many chose its black sobriety when the season offered them such freedom.11 Maskers traveled in packs, sometimes with a common theme (figure 6). The Seven Deadly Sins paraded around the square in 1756 with a robed demon leading the way. Each held a sign identifying his sin. Most were obvious—the thief was Envy, the prostitute Lust, the “eccentric” Gluttony, and the miser Covetousness— but two carried a barb: the lawyer was Pride and the doctor was Sloth.12 As the Frenchman Maximilien Misson observed, you were free to dress however you wished but you had to live up to the character you chose. “This is when harlequins converge, scuffle, and say a hundred lunacies. Doctors dispute, preeners preen, and so forth.”13 In the final days before Lent the tempo quickened. Costumers passed in a rush of color. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. FIGURE 6. Venetian carnival Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. As the Carnival advances, the Dress grows more various and whimsical: the Women make themselves Nymphs and Shepherdesses, the men Scaramouches and Punchinellos, with twenty other Fancies, whatever first comes uppermost. For further Variety, they sometimes change Sexes: Women appear in Men’s Habits, and Men in Women, and so are now and then pick’d up, to the great disappointment of the Lover… . Their general Rendezvous is the Piazza di San Marco, which large as it is, is perfectly throng’d with them, from thence they march in Shoals to the Ridotto which is not far off.14 Some went as their social opposites. In the 1770s, for instance, “false beggars” were a carnival fashion, as men and women of noble birth dressed in rags, rubbed their faces with grime, and went begging from café to café in the piazza.15 A more profligate version featured the shredding of fine fabrics to make a tattered suit that at once mocked the poor and flaunted one’s own wealth. But reversals also worked from the other direction, sometimes with a political charge. An Englishman on the grand tour was especially amused by six men in lawyers’ garb “with very scurvy gowns and weather-beaten wigs” who seized strangers in the crowd and told them they faced charges. The joke was apparently popular. Twenty-five years later, in 1759, two commoners dressed as attorneys went through the streets loudly complaining about the judicial system. They also cited shopkeepers for fabricated infractions and demanded they pay fines on the spot.16 This was just the sort of cheek that visitors hoped to see when they came to Venice: a great anonymous frolic in which all participated as equals. Perfect the part and you are whoever you wish to be. “The mask rendered every inequality equal,” the nineteenth-century Lexicon of the Veneto declared, looking over its shoulder to survey the previous five centuries. It was the coin of the realm for “the greatest nobles, the vilest plebeians, and the most eminent informants.”17 Also writing in the nineteenth century, the historian Samuele Romanin drew a connection between the maskers’ borrowed equality and their free mingling. The mask was the Venetians’ preferred dress, “worn by the most grave magistrates including State Inquisitors, by the doge himself, by foreign princes and ambassadors, so that, freed of all other designation and greeting one another by no other name than masker, they could go everywhere, mixing in with the populace and protected from every insult and offense.”18 Under the mask, conversation flowed freely among people who would not otherwise have spoken. One approving newspaper termed their familiarity “illustrious,” but many others, especially within the Church and government, labeled the conversations dangerous.19 A 1755 book dedicated to Pope Benedict Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. XIV contended that carnival’s pleasures were the work of Satan. It carries a blistering attack on what its author, Daniele Concina, called “modern conversation.” “Wise men the world over confirm that these modern conversations are … the source of all disorder. They are the cause of divorce among married couples, dissension among families, irreparable loss to youth, and the destruction of the patrimony. They promote luxury, softness, sloth, pomp, and vanity.”20 Agents of the State Inquisitors faced the nearly impossible task of monitoring what was said, and whenever possible who had said it, in the city’s cafés during carnival. Coffeehouses with names such as The King of France, Pitt the Hero, Rainbow, and Abundance lined the arcades that ran along the edge of Piazza San Marco. During carnival, revelers spent entire evenings here shouting over the din in stifling heat.21 The eighteenth century saw an explosion in the number of cafés in Venice, with more than two hundred in 1750. The authorities tried to stay ahead of the threat they believed cafés posed to decency. When the Englishman Edward Wright came to Venice for the 1720 carnival, he learned that the government had banned seats in the coffeehouses in order to discourage “Meetings or Cabals of any sort.” The explanation is questionable. Standing doesn’t keep people from talking. To judge from the transcripts of surveillance agents, moreover, there was no shortage of conversation in these dark spaces.22 The cafés of Venice, especially during carnival, provided women with a chance to leave the predictable routine of everyday life. This bothered a good many defenders of tradition. For the patrician Giacomo Nani, women’s freedom to speak was a symptom of social decline. When women entered cafés, he observed, they put aside their blushing timidity (which was their major ornament, he added) and assumed that they were equal to others there, “putting themselves so to speak in the arms of all who pass by, even those of basest birth, who display the worst morals and the guiltiest conduct.”23 Others responded archly: New-fangled Machiavels, Discoursing on politics In casini and cafés, On beds and bidets, Concoct novel systems As legislatresses, Assess the Republic And supplant dogaressas.24 Convinced of the moral harm incurred when the sexes spoke freely to one another, the government issued an edict in 1743 forbidding women from entering Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. cafés. Agents fanned out to notify proprietors of the new rule. The exercise had its ironies. When they came to Francesco Righetti’s café near San Moisè, they encountered his daughter Eugenia, who was working in her sick father’s stead. It fell to Eugenia to refuse women entry and disallow all “women’s conversations.”25 A small number of cafés received permission to serve women on procession days but only if accompanied by a man. The order was particularly difficult to enforce, given the pervasiveness of the tabàro and baùta among women and men. As was often the case with laws pertaining to dress, state agents reported violators assiduously, but few were punished. One of them wrote that he had seen women of all ranks behaving “in a manner that does not distinguish gentlewomen from maidservants and ladies of the street.”26 Another said that the atmosphere in a café evoked a brothel—“a continuous bacchanal from morning until night”—with men and women, masked and unmasked, mingling unchecked.27 Even as traditionalists expressed their outrage over women’s conversations, certain establishments drew a clientele that was still more scandalous. In the century’s closing decades, carnival crowds assembled in seedy cafés along the quay just beyond the ducal palace to watch Venice’s gnaghe. These were men who dressed in full skirts, beads, cloth caps, and flesh-colored masks (figure 7). Some came as Friulian peasant girls, others as Neapolitans with lemons and guitars. The name described their voices, which sounded like cats in heat, a whining nasally GNAAWW—GAAYY! Others compared them to crows. The obscenities they hurled were by all accounts stupefying, not just for their content but for being uttered so shamelessly in public. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 7. Cross-dressing in carnival: a Venetian gnaga Gnaghe sometimes pulled boys dressed as babies along by the hand. In a letter to his mother, the Englishman Joseph Spence expressed horror at having seen one such couple during carnival. A fleshy man dressed as a nursemaid suckled a youth in swaddling clothes. When Spence and a companion stared in disbelief, the boy spewed a mouthful of milk at them. Spence just managed to prevent his friend from “beat[ing] the baby’s teeth down his throat.”28 Contemporaries describe what they saw and heard in the darkened rooms of these cafés: gnaghe pressed tightly together, snatches of lewd jokes and insults, rumors of sodomy. Gnaghe gave impromptu performances of songs or scenes from the theater. They brawled and danced and taunted onlookers. Revelers purchased tickets and stood in long lines outside the cafés to see them.29 There are scattered reports of gnaghe throughout the eighteenth century, but their numbers in public were greatest in the 1780s. The State Inquisitors sent agents to take notes, which they did with evident discomfort. During the 1788 season, gnaghe crowded into the café Steffano on the Riva degli Schiavoni until no one else could enter. They stomped the floor and beat the tables in rhythm, blew whistles and pounded drums. The reporting agent thought he would go deaf.30 Masks were de rigueur wherever gnaghe appeared. Anonymity among these revelers was carefully maintained. “Despite the greatest diligence,” wrote Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Girolamo Lioni in a report to the Inquisitors, “I was not able to discover the name of a single masker.”31 Another night, a fistfight erupted among ten gnaghe at the Steffano, with one of them shouting, “Son of a whore!” Again Lioni: “I made many attempts to learn the identity of this masker, but it was impossible for anyone to recognize him.”32 When an unknown foreigner appeared at the Steffano unmasked one carnival night in 1788 and tried out a familiar insult (“Go bugger yourself!”), he was roundly jeered. One gnaga called out that he should mind his language in such respectable establishments. The visitor had clearly stumbled into the wrong bar and was breaking all the rules. His parting shot, duly noted by the surveillance agent on duty, was tart: “Screw you—you and all of your spying scum.”33 Others who wore masks uttered far worse oaths and were lustily applauded. Little was done to prevent gnaghe from gathering. Agents sometimes followed them throughout the city. Angelo Tamiazzo describes gnaghe of a fresh age parading around the piazza, under the Procuratie, and in restaurants. Not even Geneva, the land of Calvin, he comments with either outrage or cutting irony, hosts such shamelessness.34 Another agent spotted what Tamiazzo hints at, the fifteen-yearold son of the patrician Alvise Corner engaged in sodomy under the arches of the Procuratie Vecchie.35 Carnival’s promiscuous mingling—women with women, men with women, men with men—struck a chord with travelers. To them, the carnival of Venice meant a holiday from morality, where disguise made all things possible. Cover the face, alter the voice, and anything could happen. Naturally the most thrilling possibilities were sexual. Englishmen on the grand tour never tired of Venice/Venus puns or of the rhymes they inspired. The Venetian Giorgio Baffo, a noble gone to seed who dabbled in politics, spent his free time composing pornographic verses that ratified the tourists’ view. Anyone seeking a noble amusement Comes to St. Mark’s every evening at dusk. Here you will find high society eager To show off its riches and wallow in lust. If you’re looking for fun in this beautiful city, Then come to the square when the ladies walk by. They loiter and mingle, these legions of women, Who are willing and able to make your bird fly. Then it suddenly seems like a public bordello As a thousand pink twats start to open their lips, Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. And the pale little fish with his head above water Bows to each of them nobly before he commits.36 Visitors came to carnival expecting this sort of thing. Their giddy accounts in letters and travelogues give an indication of what they heard and saw. “Carnival is a veritable harvest of love!” gushed the Frenchman Limojan de Saint-Didier. During carnival, he said, masked nuns received their brothers’ courtesans in their convents, bringing them into their cells, sharing confidences, calling them sistersin-law, exchanging caresses.37 On his first day in Venice for the 1730 carnival, the Baron von Pöllnitz donned a scarlet and silver domino for a walk through the city. He had scarcely entered Piazza San Marco when two masked ladies approached. One began “twitching my sleeve,” he writes, and addressed him. “We are inclin’d to think that you are no mean Person. We should be glad of your conversation, and you will do us a Pleasure to take a turn with us round the Square.” A conversation ensued, introductions were made, and Pöllnitz duly fell in love with the younger of the pair.38 Masks exist only “to give occasion to abundance of loveadventures,” wrote Joseph Addison on his return to England, “for there is something more intriguing in the amours of Venice, than in those of other countries.”39 Francesco Careri, visiting from Naples, accepted a masked stranger’s invitation for a glass of muscat, and the two spoke at length in a café. The woman raised her mask and Careri saw that she was a prostitute. He ended up with the bill. “Look how vigilant you must be to avoid falling into such a trap,” he warned.40 Many of course voiced disapproval—Charles Baldwyn, for instance, called Venice the “Brothell house of Europe”—but it didn’t always sound convincing.41 The eighteenth-century Frenchman Ange Goudar, writing in the voice of a “Chinese spy,” begins what sounds like a full-bore denunciation. “One cannot speak of such morals without shuddering.” He went on to shudder at some length. “One breathes an air of voluptuousness entering this city, an air dangerous for morality. Everything about it is about show, about pleasure, about frivolous entertainment… . Everyone is free to follow every kind of debauchery. License is the lingua franca; there is such liberty that all are liberated even from remorse.” Marriage is mocked, Goudar continues, fidelity nonexistent, and the only known love illicit. In the gambling dens, servants learn to steal and the young discover wantonness. All of this is the fault of the mask, which allows Venetians to “abandon themselves to their vices without the slightest embarrassment.”42 The view of Venetian carnival as a time outside of time, when common mores were suspended and identities put in flux, was—and is—powerfully attractive. For connoisseurs of pleasure, it announced a moment when society’s artificial rules gave way to the truths of Nature by way of the senses. For the disapproving, it Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. furnished a ready narrative for the Republic’s decline and fall: moral decay weakened the foundations and the state eventually collapsed. And for those seeking political meaning in acts of transgression, it granted ample evidence for equality in the moment of disguise. The so-called decadence of Venetian carnival had something for everyone. Its ecstatic celebrations were blinding not only to revelers caught up in the moment but also to many subsequent observers who have tried to understand what was happening. In that sense, Venetian carnival is a bit like the proverbial wayside inn that promises all luxuries, as long as you bring them yourself. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. CHAPTER 3 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Even Odds After sundown, maskers not in a café or at the theater were likely to be in front of a table throwing dice or playing cards. Nowhere was the social mix greater than in the city’s gambling halls. Here agents of the Inquisitors, expert in penetrating the mask, regularly identified a wide assortment of types: patricians and noble ladies, merchants, Jews, foreign diplomats, vagabonds, prostitutes. Nowhere did the mingling carry more immediate consequences. This was a field where how much you won or lost depended on the sharpness of your wit, how well you judged your opponent, and the whim of fortune, who smiled on all indifferently. Rank held no sway. Although gambling had gone on in Venice for centuries, its glory days were from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. As with many social vices, the city rulers first tried to destroy it by an outright ban. When that failed, they tried to limit its damage by heavy regulation. Unlicensed gambling dens, typically in the backrooms of barbershops, fueled a black-market industry. Then the rulers decided to embrace it. In 1638, the Council of Ten granted nobles permission to sponsor games of chance in their homes. Marco Dandolo, following the letter but not the spirit of the law, petitioned the Council to allow “private” gambling in his sprawling palazzo near San Moisè. Soon hundreds of players were assembling there. The quarters were dubbed the Ridotto, from the verb ridurre, “to reduce or abridge.” An anonymous poem “In Praise of the New Ridotto” captures something of its atmosphere, which combined burnished opulence, the lure of easy money, and an abundance of masks. This is where they come to wager Ducats, sequins, silver, gold. It has no equal; none can match Its splendid air or noble mold. A sculpted goddess in the foyer Keeps stately vigil night and day. At the threshold stands a gambler, Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. With mask in hand and keen to play.1 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Two large chandeliers flanked a central staircase, which led to the main gallery. Upstairs were smaller rooms intended for conversation, dining, and the sale of liqueurs, meats, and jellies. One room was called the “Chamber of Sighs,” where lovers, the weary, and the unlucky went to rest or nurse wounds.2 Provided one’s clothes were decent, one could engage even the most refined ladies in conversation at the Ridotto, though all insults or offenses were forbidden, since, as one gambler remarked, “the mask is sacred.”3 In the main room, an eerie silence reigned—“a silence greater than in the church”—as masked men and women sat wordlessly around small tables, their anguish or sudden luck conveyed only by a grimace or twitch.4 The banker, by law a noble and the sole figure obliged to keep his face uncovered, sat at a central table piled high with coins and fresh cards. The games were simple. In bassetta, punters staked bets on the likelihood of a given card appearing; in faraone, they wagered on a particular sequence. Skill was relevant, but as much or more depended on luck. Away from the play in other parts of the building, people milled about in couples or small groups, taking advantage of the mask’s liberty to circulate. Local celebrities were sometimes recognized and hailed. After the triumphal premiere of Carlo Goldoni’s Ladies’ Tales, the playwright’s friends paraded him from room to room. And after the failure of his Old Codger, Goldoni returned there in a mask to hear people condemn the play, an experience he found oddly cleansing. He knew it was bad.5 More often, a hush bordering on the funereal prevailed. Contemporaries described what it was like to see scores of maskers moving mutely through the dim candlelight. “The Place is dark and silent, a few glimmering Tapers with a halfLight shew a Set of Beings, stalking along with their pale Faces, which look like so many Death’s Heads poking out through black Pouches; so that one would almost imagine himself in some enchanted Place, or some Region of the Dead.”6 The Venetian painter Francesco Guardi conveyed an atmosphere of spectral elegance as maskers trace a circuit that resembles a dance (figure 8). Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 8. Francesco Guardi, The Ridotto The Ridotto was also a dangerous place, especially for those who won or lost big. Thieves lurked in the dark streets surrounding the Ridotto, and unpaid debts were sometimes settled by violence. Gamblers could count on finding prostitutes among the masked women, and in the rooms upstairs men sold obscene pictures and illicit verse.7 There was also the threat of addiction. Portraits of the compulsive gambler appear in virtually every Venetian memoir of the time. The prodigal spender, ravaged by his obsession, stakes his savings on a last desperate attempt to win it all back. Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a Venetian by birth, was drawn into the “vicious habit” by a lover who was addicted. They went to the Ridotto almost every night and were soon pawning their clothes and borrowing from gondoliers in the “fallacious hope” of recouping their losses.8 The Council of Ten declared that the tables drew a “detestable mix of patricians, foreigners, and plebeians, of honest women and public prostitutes, of cards and weapons by day and by night [that] confound every status, consume every fortune, and corrupt every custom.”9 Their greatest concern was not for the meager income of playwrights like da Ponte. It was for the patrimony of ancient families, whose younger members were by no means the only noble players to burn vast sums in a single stretch. Venetian magistrates worried most about two things at the Ridotto: uncontrolled mingling and profligate waste. Even without masks, games of chance eroded the social differences among players and increased the danger and excitement, especially in stratified societies such as Venice. As Voltaire said, gambling’s rules grant no exceptions, admit no variety, and brook no tyranny. Denis Diderot made the point more directly. “What a wonderful thing gambling is: nothing establishes equality among men more perfectly.”10 Masks encouraged the recklessness. One critic reasoned that if nobles were to appear barefaced in such establishments, as Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. they did in church, they would set an example of moderation for others.11 The problem was that they preferred to come masked. There were attempts to reform the Ridotto, often involving masks. In 1703, moved by a mixture of pragmatism and control, the Council of Ten banned masks outright. Any noble in violation would be banished from the Great Council for two years and fined one hundred ducats; commoners in violation would be sentenced to five years in prison. The effect was immediate, although it was not what regulators expected. People stopped coming to the Ridotto. Strong pressure to readmit masks followed, with much of it coming from nobles, and within a year the Council reversed itself. Masks were made mandatory for commoners and optional for nobles, though few nobles came unmasked. The Ridotto sprang back to life.12 Gambling destroyed family wealth, eroded self-control, and fueled an unregulated economy in which money passed from hand to hand and class to class. It drew the opprobrium of the Church and the strong censure of civic leaders. It added little to the economy. Some likened it to usury. Others considered it sinful in sanctioning lies. The deceit of card sharks was well known, as was the way the activity insinuated itself into the mind like a narcotic. In short, gambling was neither socially productive nor personally ennobling.13 Most nobles knew such arguments and probably rehearsed them to one another. Yet not all of gambling’s effects were damaging. It also forged a temporary intimacy that was otherwise inconceivable in this city of strict boundaries. For hours at a time, Jews and Catholics, Venetians and foreigners, men and women of every class and occupation huddled together to play by rules that applied equally to all. For Jonathan Walker, who has written an authoritative account of gambling in Venetian noble culture, games of chance structured an etiquette of self-control much as the court and its rituals shaped politesse in France.14 In both cases, passions were channeled and rough instincts domesticated for the sake of comity. In Venice, it was a glimpse of what relatively free relations not colored by birth might look like. It is no surprise that the authorities took a dim view of this. By the middle of the eighteenth century, they were convinced that gambling had become a genuine social evil. Agents sent by the Inquisitors furnished a stream of alarming dossiers: about the damage done under the “pretext” of the mask at a regular pool run by Giovanni Canea, where priests, Jews, patricians, Spaniards, and Neapolitans met; about the two nobles, two priests, one Armenian, and five commoners—all named —who met at Dominico Modetto’s casino; about the “gentlemen, priests, friars, Jews, and the largest part of vagabonds, thieves, and riff-raff from here and abroad” who congregated in rooms near St. Mark’s.15 The authorities could not hope to eliminate gambling in these smaller halls, Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. much less in residences or hideaways. What they could do was make an example of the most visible such establishment, the Ridotto. So in 1744, by an overwhelming margin of 720 to 21, the Great Council voted to close the illustrious hall. A medal was struck to mark the event. On one side were overturned tables in an empty Ridotto. On the other was a lion attacking a crouching gambler whose mask and scattered cards are on the ground.16 Gambling of course continued in Venice, with more than the twenty-one nobles who had voted against the ban no doubt participating. But this central symbol of vice and improbable school for concord among unequals, where bankruptcy and windfall were available to the small and great alike, would not reopen under the Republic. Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. CHAPTER 4 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Blood Sport The most popular daytime amusement during carnival’s closing week was a public sport composed of equal parts glee and gore. Caccie dei tori, “bull hunts,” were a refinement of games that dated back to Roman times. They had existed in one form or another throughout the thousand-year history of Venice. Almost always sponsored affairs, they were usually organized by Venetian patricians. They sometimes coincided with the visits of foreign sovereigns or other dignitaries. Occasionally nobles received permission to host a hunt for occasions outside of carnival. Despite their popularity, only on scattered rare occasions did the Venetians who flocked to them reflect on their meaning—on why they endured through the centuries, why they accompanied carnival in particular, and what their brutality expressed. A chaotic procession led bulls from the slaughterhouse near the Jewish ghetto at San Giobbe to whichever square played host. Two young men called tiratori (handlers) typically led the animals through the narrow streets by ropes tied to their horns. As the entourage picked up followers, the parade grew rowdier and more dangerous. Some punched or kicked the bulls; others hurled stones; the handlers themselves wrenched the cords from side to side to keep the animals off balance, with the whole heaving mass of people “hollowing in such a frantic manner as tho’ they were endeavoring to make the Beasts they follow as mad as themselves.”1 Handlers less frequently transported the animals by boat, with the result that bulls sometimes landed in the water. Approaching the square, handlers held their bulls steady as others whipped them into a rage, knocking them down, landing blows on their heads and horns, singeing them with fireworks or torches. Now began the hunt proper. Dogs specially bred to inflict harm were let loose among the animals in groups of three or four, ripping into their sides or tearing into their ears and testicles. When the dogs bit into a bull and wouldn’t let go, trainers called cavacani (dog-extractors) wrested them loose by their tails, first using their hands and then, if necessary, their teeth. The handlers worked to channel the bulls’ strength as they bucked and bolted to avoid being thrown off balance. The key was to deprive the bull of any opportunity to charge one of the handlers. Cheers rose when the handlers “threw” a bull, that is, jerked the ropes in such a way as to make it fall (figure 9). A successful hunt exhausted the bull. A Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. failed hunt left dogs, and sometimes handlers, trampled or gored. All hunts ended the same way, with the death of the bull by decapitation either on the spot or, more commonly, at the slaughterhouse. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. An anonymous witness to one lavish bull hunt in 1688 called it a patch of paradise on earth. In the compact square of Santa Maria Formosa, a favored site for bull hunts, palazzi were decorated from top to bottom. Banners and colored carpets hung from balconies. Spectators filled makeshift stands erected for the event. The crowd was so large that they also lined windows and leaned out from rooftops. Most wore masks. “They enjoyed the liberty of the mask in this place, and were dressed in so many styles and fashions, in clothes both modern and antique, with rich adornment in gold, silver, pearls, gems, and precious stones.” The crowd, which included a Tuscan prince as guest of honor, was “so splendid that no monarchy could possibly match it.” When handlers entered the square with the animals, which on this occasion included bulls and bears, the crowd greeted them with “venomous” jeers and mocking laughter. The spectators suddenly went silent when a gutter gave way and two women plunged three stories to the ground, “leaving, along with their lives, some of their brains on the pavement.” Later a priest fell when a balcony in the square collapsed, but he held on to a pipe until others could retrieve him, “more dead than alive.” But the hunt went on. Drums and warrior bugles sounded and men in livery led the animals in, group after group. The crowd watched with “a mixture of cruelty and pleasure” as the cries echoed against the buildings. “The wild beasts, suffering the injustice of an enemy freed of all restraint, bellowed for justice.” Handlers worked their way through sixty bulls and more than three hundred dogs, the former “condemned to live the most painful torments.” Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. FIGURE 9. A bull “thrown” by handlers, to the crowd’s delight They next dragged out bears, which turned on the dogs with unexpected fury, sinking their fangs into the dogs’ small backs, pulling off hunks of flesh in their claws, and causing them to “sing” with howls of pain, all to the delirious laughter of the crowd. The day ended with the beheading of an immense bull in the center of the square, “which made all who saw it ecstatic.”2 Bull hunts ran until the last Sunday of carnival, when a culminating bout took place in front of the ducal palace. Smaller hunts were scattered throughout the city’s neighborhood squares—in Santa Margherita, San Polo, San Giacomo dell’Orio, San Geremia, San Barnaba, Santo Stefano, San Simeon Grande—and in large courtyards of structures such as Ca’ Foscari or the Fondaco dei Turchi. Usually stands were built in the larger squares. Sometimes spectators were mixed; on other occasions nonnobles were excluded. Handlers wore scarlet vests and Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. black stockings. On occasion, participants dressed in commedia dell’arte costumes as Pantalone or Arlecchino. Once the Council of Ten granted its permission, sponsors were free to plan the spectacle as they saw fit. They had to buy the bulls and arrange for their retrieval at the slaughterhouse, oversee construction of the stands, draw up a guest list, and make sure there were enough dogs and handlers.3 Men earned reputations as impresarios of the hunt, vying to outdo one another in the manner of killing and the number of victims. Antonio Costa choreographed a hunt in 1739 for the visiting Elector of Saxony that included 130 bulls and two hundred dogs. Giorgio Celini’s 1708 hunt in Piazza San Marco destroyed 150 bulls, with armies of dogs taking them on twenty-five at a time.4 One four-hour production in 1767 fielded two hundred bulls. It employed forty-eight masked and costumed men representing Spanish, English, Hungarian, and Swiss warriors and enough musicians to keep the music playing until the bitter end, when six butchers lopped off the heads of six bulls in a single stroke.5 The extremes to which some went in defending the sport crystallized its lunacy for one Venetian. Michele Battaglia, the author of a slender volume titled Mindless Chatter on Venetian Bull Hunts, was standing along the perimeter of the smallish square of San Basilio when a wounded bull let out a moan. Battaglia winced, two dogs continued their attack, and a man standing near him announced that this was truly a beautiful event. Battaglia replied that it would be more beautiful if it featured less cruelty. The man exploded with indignation. Battaglia had the heart of a woman, he raged. If Battaglia had his way, the whole town would starve. No one would have the courage to kill a chicken or a turkey. He went on: “The bull hunts—and all things that are dangerous, bloody, and tragic—make us fearless.” As the man spoke, a bull broke loose and knocked him to the ground. Battaglia knelt by his side. “Get away from me!” the man cried. “I won’t be helped by a coward like you.” Others laid him across their shoulders. He was still cursing Battaglia as they carried him off.6 Battaglia was probably the exception. Jubilation over the gruesome ritual is a feature of most accounts. Allegrezza—“liveliness,” one might say, or, somewhat more loosely, “giddy fun”—was the word used to describe the atmosphere as two hundred bulls were maimed. On this occasion, the writer compared the hunt favorably to gladiatorial bouts. The Caesars pitted humans against one another, which divided the populace. Attacking animals, by contrast, produced solidarity. It was “pleasing to all, from our greatest ones to the vilest plebeians.”7 A visitor in the early 1720s discerned the same: “You see Dogs, Bulls, and Barcaroles, all in a heap together, within his Serenity’s Court: but this is to be taken as another Instance of the Venetian Liberty, where the meanest of the People may make thus free with their Prince.”8 Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Insofar as the participants considered its significance at all, the joy in such slaughter was experienced as a displacement. As the martyr of San Basilio said just before the bull felled him, the ritual gave Venetians the strength and resolve to confront their enemies. Everything that is dangerous, bloody, and tragic makes us fearless. It was a controlled public version of what might follow one day on the battlefield in the mayhem and uncertainty of war. Masks and costumes turned the hunt into a theatrical piece. On this level, it operated as a show of strength, cast as entertainment but meant to convey power. The spectacles’ faux English or Hungarian soldiers almost always appeared when foreign princes were visiting. Concluding his account of the 1688 hunt in Santa Maria Formosa, a witness wrote: “All enjoyed the noble entertainment this day, which shows that the sons of Mark’s lion are not afraid of even the most ferocious and beastly bulls of our Asian enemies.”9 Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. CHAPTER 5 Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Fat Thursday The climax of Venetian carnival came not on Tuesday but on the previous Thursday, giovedì grasso, nearly a week before the silence of Lent put an abrupt end to the long season of festivity. At its center was a lavish spectacle that brought all ranks together in common celebration. The staged events, repeated year after year, century after century, affirmed the Republic’s image and put the government’s own vision for the season front and center. The state-glorying pageant was high spirited, but it also employed pomp to keep hilarity firmly in check. Anything revelers might do after such a display was bound to be anticlimactic. This was exactly what the day’s planners intended. The events staged on giovedì grasso evoked an ancient rivalry between the neighboring coastal towns of Aquileia and Grado, both of them northeast of Venice on the Adriatic. Tensions came to a head in the twelfth century over who held the greater ecclesiastical authority. Both boasted of papal preference, both displayed their credentials with the remains of Christian martyrs, and both claimed the title of Metropolitan, a rank just beneath the Holy See of Rome. The status was important, as it conferred regional jurisdiction in sacred and secular matters. Aquileia, a major port in the Roman empire, traced its Christian origins to St. Mark, who according to tradition had preached there on instructions from St. Peter. But as the Gradenese were quick to point out, Aquileia’s patriarch fled to Grado for protection from the Huns, bringing with him the relics of two saints baptized by Mark. This, the Gradenese said, was a de facto transfer of all ecclesiastical authority. In the words of the twelfth-century Chronicon Gradense, Grado became “civitatem nove Aquilegie metropolim esse perpetuum,” “the new Aquileia, Metropolitan in perpetuity.”1 Religious officials in Aquileia differed. Resentments simmered until 1155, when Pope Adrian IV granted Grado’s bishop, an ally of Venice, jurisdiction over parts of the Dalmatian coast. The German-born patriarch of Aquileia responded seven years later by leading a group of fighters from the surrounding Friulian countryside to invade Grado, declaring it to be a precinct of greater Aquileia. Venice rightly saw the invasion as a challenge to its own authority and intervened. In popular memory, the glory of what followed obscured the larger struggle behind these events. Patriarch Ulrich of Aquileia was a willing pawn in Frederick Johnson, James H.. Venice Incognito : Masks in the Serene Republic, University of California Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=669815. Created from newschool on 2019-06-05 03:28:29. Copyright © 2011. University of California Press. All rights reserved. Barbarossa’s grand strategy to incorporate northern Italy into the Holy Roman Empire. Having claimed the title of emperor, Frederick came to Italy with his armies in 1154 intending to be blessed by the pope. Italian emissaries agreed to his call for a diet, and representatives met in the plains of Roncaglia, but as Frederick’s designs grew clear and his army advanced, many, including the Venetians, rose in resistance. In 1161, Barbarossa drew a noose around Venice in the form of a land blockade and prepared to attack. His armies struck Venetian garrisons on the mainland and took captives. Ulrich was in contact with Frederick when his men assaulted Grado in 1162. What looked to many like a small skirmish in a petty rivalry was rightly seen by Doge Vitale Michiel as a threat to Venetian survival. The move was another step in Barbarossa’s quest for the crown jewel. The doge therefore sent a fleet of overwhelming force to Grado, surrounded the city, retook the piazza, and brought Ulrich, a dozen of his canons, and some seven hundred captives to Venice. The priest and canons were marched through the streets to taunts and curses. The doge set a ransom with appropriately insulting terms. The patriarch and his twelve priests would be returned to Aquileia in exchange for a bull and twelve pigs. The animals were duly slaughtered, to the delight of the populace. Over the next decade, Venice and other members of the Lombard League repelled all of Frederick’s advances on northern Italy. As for Aquileia, Venice demanded that the city send a bull and twelve pigs yearly on the anniversary of Ulrich’s defeat. (By the mid-sixteenth century they were slaughtering only bulls, Doge Andrea Gritti having decided that pigs were not appropriately dignified.)2 Although remote, the memory Ulrich’s humiliation remained fresh in the minds of the populace. Five hundred years after the event, Marino Sanuto called the events of giovedì grasso “a symbol of our lordships’ war with the patriarch.”3 A century later, Francesco Sansovino recognized in the festival the “perpetual memory of victory.”4 When a traveler to Venice in 1671 asked a native to explain the ceremony, the Venetian patiently recounted the events and their symbols and explained their relevance. “Much in our ancient history is unknown, which amuses me,” he said, “for I know how to take stock reflectively, and with that understandin...
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