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 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 understanding I can grasp the present.”5
As carnival of 1789 approached—six hundred years after the original victory—the newspaper Gazzetta Urbana Veneta reminded its readers of the venerable history of “this most ancient of festivals, giovedì grasso,” and dwelt on the “serenity of the day.” Those latter words no doubt surprised visitors who had come expecting debauches.6
The ceremony adhered to the same basic form for centuries. Venetians crowded into the small square before the ducal palace and usually spilled into the piazza in front of St. Mark’s. Guilds processed carrying identifying banners, with the butchers and blacksmiths managing bulls near the front. Workers from the shipyards followed, their faces blackened or masked, carrying blunt swords and wooden sticks. When all were assembled, a palace door opened above. Magistrates, legislators, and other dignitaries filed out to take seats on the colonnaded balcony, a procession that took half an hour. These included the Ducal Council, the judicial Council of Forty, state attorneys, state censors, the Council of Ten, ambassadors from abroad, senators, and at last the doge and his wife. This was the Republic arrayed and on display. It comprised a fair portion of the aristocracy, which in 1750 accounted for about 3 percent of the population and alone ran the government. They wore their full regalia, with each group in the distinctive attire of its position. The sight was splendid, with brilliant splashes of scarlet and crimson against the salmon and gray stone of the palace.
Soon workers from the Arsenale were executing the complex steps of the moresca, an ancient sword dance that, despite its art, retained strong intimations of battle. The pulsing rumble of the wood and steel and the barely suppressed violence of the dance prepared the crowd for a brutal climax: the beheading of a bull with a single blow. The executioner stood before his victim, extending his arm, testing his reach, “sizing it up ever so carefully—three times, in fact—with his massive blade,” an eyewitness reports, “wishing to avoid the whistles of the crowd, who said that the bull represented the ancient patriarch of Aquileia.”7 The sword flashed, a head dropped, cheers erupted.
The populace, their eyes keen and glimmering and their hearts filled with their own glory, erupted in a transport of joy that was also a pledge of new victories to come. They awaited this signal with impatience and seemed to relive their day of triumph, applauding the shame and punishment of their enemy with deafening shouts. This grand execution, or we should say rather the symbolic sacrifice made in the presence of the doge and the Signoria, was always accompanied by uninterrupted clapping, whistles, and loud taunts against the vanquished.8
All eyes now turned to the bell tower of St. Mark’s, where a boy launched himself in a basket attached to a rope that stretched from the campanile to the palace balcony. If the flight was successful, the child crash-landed somewhere near the doge clutching a bundle of flowers and some lines of poetry to be read to the crowd. Alas, not all were, and citizens gathered up the dead or dying where they fell.9
After the flight, acrobats stationed near the two great columns next to the water went through a series of maneuvers called the Forze d’Ercole, “The Labors of Hercules,” climbing to form pyramids or standing on poles laid across shoulders. In some years, they performed on a massive stage in the middle of the piazzetta. In others, they performed at the water’s edge or in boats. There were daytime fireworks, spirited music, dancing all around, and spontaneous salutes exchanged between the governors and the governed. When they had seen enough, the assembled dignitaries left the populace to their own celebrations and went inside the palace, where they were given iron-tipped batons and led into a spacious room in which wooden models of historic Friulian castles had been erected. Each Venetian noble then took a turn whacking the structures.
At the end of the day, the doge disbursed meat from the slaughtered bull to the city’s residents. This particular carnival custom was among the oldest and longest-lived, dating from before 1272, when Martin da Canal observed the doge giving meat to “the nobles and important men of Venice.” In later centuries, meat went to prisoners as well. Eventually a system emerged whereby priests received portions for distribution in their own parishes. The practice persisted into the late eighteenth century, when the doge sent a pound of flesh to each of the city’s neighborhoods. The internal organs went to the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls whose most famous teacher-in-residence was Antonio Vivaldi. Other gifts from the municipality might accompany the meat, including loaves of bread, carafes of wine, and bowls of rice soup.10
That Ulrich’s defeat in 1162 coincided with the carnival season was a great gift to the city’s leaders.11 Their elevation of its memory into a crowning ceremony in this season of rebirth was a stroke of political genius. The first mention of carnival in Venice dates from 1094, more than two generations before the victory. Masks, which first appeared in Venice in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, were not yet part of its festivities.12 Celebrating Ulrich’s defeat defined Venetian carnival, putting the stamp of collective victory on a season not ordinarily linked to the civic good. It is no wonder that doges and senators, from this moment on, preserved every symbolic detail of the ancient feud on giovedì grasso. It put a face on a foreign foe at a time when the spirit of mockery might well have targeted the state or religion. It gave the rambunctious energy of spring a constructive and common solidarity.
Most of all, it kept the power of the Republic uppermost in the minds of Venetians—no small feat, since most outsiders viewed the activities as a series of dazzling if unconnected stunts. To the Venetian memoirist Antonio Lamberti, writing just after the Republic’s fall, every detail pointed beyond itself to a shared victory. “The edifice and fireworks recalled the castles destroyed and burned; the moresca was the battle; the boy who brought a palm to the doge, the establishment of peace; the Labors of Hercules showed the strength and fortitude of the Venetians in the war; and finally the beheading of the oxen, celebrated in ancient custom by the killing of a dozen pigs and a bull, demonstrated our hatred of the patriarch Ulrich and his twelve canons.”13
Did organizers intend Thursday’s spectacle to steal Tuesday’s thunder? If so, they succeeded. The last day of carnival in Venice was not typically the unhinged blowout that visitors might have expected. Consider the mood as midnight approached on Mardi Gras 1788. Horns blared, drums rumbled, there was a roar of people shouting. By one local newspaper’s account, the noise was loud enough to awaken the dead. Yet closer to the scene it was clear that some “invisible restraint” kept the maskers peaceful and even proper. There was no obscenity, wrote a correspondent for the local press, and respect guided the maskers, who comprised young and old, noble and commoner. It was “a masked nation” in high spirits, warmed by food and wine and passing the night as “pleasure’s prey, though without a single disturbance arising.” The paper lauded the “wisdom of the government, which knows how to shape subjects to follow their duties, even when they seem most at risk of neglecting them, without resorting to troops.”14
The season’s finale was under way. Someone had worked up a chain of several hundred revelers, which was now snaking through the city. Led by a tall masker costumed as a Spanish officer, the procession made its way from St. Mark’s to the Rialto bridge, over to San Polo, and back across the Grand Canal, ferried a dozen at a time by the San Tomà traghetto. People along the route brought out food and drink as the revelers passed. Some latched on to the chain and joined in the dancing. “There was not the slightest disturbance, which is not surprising to those who already know, through infinite other examples, the admirable docility and gentleness of our nation.”15
Docility and gentleness were two terms that visitors did not normally associate with carnival. Reverence was a third. But according to the Venetian Giovanni Rossi, when the midnight bells signaling Lent rang out, most locals dropped whatever they were doing and hurried to the nearest church. “After having spent the whole night amidst dissipation and noise, they did not fail to enter the churches to hear the first Mass.” It seemed almost comic to those who did not know Venice, this sudden intrusion of piety with its incense and ashes. Alongside families of the parish and honest workers in their street clothes were harlequins, demons, and men dressed as women. Was it penitence that drew them? Or was church merely the last stop on a reveler’s itinerary that had begun hours earlier in the gambling hall? The contrast between the costumes and this final destination was great, Rossi admitted, but he claimed that the impulse was sincere. It just showed, he wrote, that in Venice there were two things you couldn’t be by half: a gentleman and a Christian.16