CHAPTER 2
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 half-masks. 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 make-believe 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.

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.

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

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 is accurate. This list comes from two eighteenth-century sources:

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.

FIGURE 6. Venetian carnival

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 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 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.

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 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-year-old 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,
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 sisters-in-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 love-adventures,” 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 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.