This book would not have been possible without the generous help of many others. May these acknowledgments serve as a token of my gratitude. The research for the book was done with the financial assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Boston University Humanities Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. In Venice, I benefited from the expert advice of personnel in the Archivio di Stato, the Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, the Biblioteca della Casa di Carlo Goldoni, the Biblioteca della Fondazione Querini Stampalia, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Michela del Borgo of the Archivio di Stato was eager with her suggestions and advice, which were immensely valuable. Gianluigi Passuello of the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume in the Palazzo Mocenigo was kind and resourceful. Dennis Cecchin and Francesco Turio Böhm spent time over several visits helping me find relevant illustrations. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères in Paris for squeezing me into a crowded reading room against all protocol. Susan Halpert of Harvard University’s Houghton Library helped smooth the way for securing photographs from that extraordinary collection.
Adelheid Gealt’s guidance was essential in locating drawings from Tiepolo’s Divertimenti per li regazzi to use in this book; her abundant help was invaluable. Sophie Botstock was similarly generous in sharing her expertise on the Pulcinella drawings. I am especially grateful to Francis
Ford for granting me permission to reproduce The Birth of Pulcinella from the private collection of his father, the late Sir Brinsley Ford, and to Joan K. Davidson for permitting Pulcinella’s Tomb to be photographed for this book.
I wish to express my appreciation to Boston University for the leaves and sabbaticals that made my work abroad possible. In particular, I thank Charles Dellheim, chair of the History Department, and Dean Jeffrey Henderson. The Boston University Humanities Foundation provided valuable support for the production of this book.
I am grateful to my copyeditor, Madeleine B. Adams, whose many small suggestions have improved my prose in a big way. I have appreciated the strong support of Niels Hooper, my editor at the University of California Press, as well as the warm encouragement of Sheila Levine.
Conversations and correspondence with friends and colleagues have aided me at every stage. Among them, I wish to acknowledge Franca R. Barricelli, Arianne Chernock, Stephen Esposito, Aaron Garrett, Frederick Ilchman, Suzanne Lye, John Jeffries Martin, Sarah Maza, Robert Nye, Michael Prince, Blythe Alice Raviola, Bruce Redford, Christopher Ricks, Jean Paul Riquelme, Dennis Romano, Guido Ruggiero, Stephen Scully, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Roger Shattuck, Parker Shipton, Francesca Trivellato, Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, James Q. Whitman, and Larry Wolff. Steve and Nancy Ortega introduced us to Venice in the early years, and Ugo Trivellato and Mariolina Toniolo helped open doors more recently. I gained much from conversations with Piero Del Negro and Paolo Preto as the book neared completion. I am especially grateful for the unfailing kindness and encouragement of Roberto Poli, who helped me through numerous conundrums translating from Italian and Venetian dialect.
I profited from the opportunity to present parts of this book in Patrice Higonnet’s Early Modern Europe seminar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies; in the Cultural and Intellectual History seminar organized by Peter Gordon and Judith Surkis also at the CES; in a conference at Princeton on Opera and Society organized by Theodore K. Rabb; among musicologists and historians of music at the University of Oslo; and on panels of the American Historical Association in Boston and New York City. Portions of part 4 appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and I am grateful for permission to use them here.
I want to acknowledge a particular debt to those who have read earlier versions of this book. Edward Muir has been generous with his support from the start; his encouragement helped to ease my reservations about entering a new field. Theodore K. Rabb has been of tremendous help in matters of both detail and structure; his professionalism is an inspiration. In our many conversations over the years, Jeffrey Ravel has taught me a great deal about masking and imposture, lies and truth-telling, early modern fraud, and much else. Suggestions from all three have made this a better book.
I owe more than I can ever say to my wife, Lydia Moland, whose immeasurable love sustains me in everything I do. We discovered Venice together in the months after we were married as I started the research for this book, and we have returned regularly over the past thirteen years. Her presence animates these pages. Venice is unimaginable without her.