CHAPTER 4
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 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.

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.”

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 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

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