CHAPTER 7
City of Masks

Throughout his affair with M. M., Casanova relied on the simple half-mask common in eighteenth-century Venice. During his trips to Murano, there was plenty to arouse suspicion—his unlikely devotion in the little chapel, his faithful presence in the convent’s visiting room, his regular visits to a certain green door at the top of the stairs. But there was one thing that would not have raised an eyebrow: his mask (figure 10).

In Casanova’s day, virtually the whole of Venetian society wore masks as daily dress, and not just during carnival. For six months of the year, beginning in early autumn and ending with Lent, masks dominated the city. They reappeared periodically throughout the summer for civic festivals and ceremonies. Nobles greeted foreign emissaries masked. Venetians entered private receptions and public theaters masked. They heard concerts, watched plays, and danced at formal balls masked. Husbands and wives met for meals masked at inns and hostels. Masked patrons sat in cafés sipping chocolate and reading the gazette, or, at lower-class establishments, eyeing other patrons to rob, swindle, or proposition. The abbé Coyer, visiting from France, marveled that men and women came masked to coffeehouses for conversation “and no one thinks twice of it.” Masks, he said, “are honest for both sexes.”¹

Maskers lined balconies and clogged the Grand Canal in boats for regattas and processions. They crowded in windows overlooking the bullfights that were a regular bloody feature of the calendar. Thugs on orders to harass or harm went about their dark business masked. Illicit booksellers sold their clandestine merchandise masked. Agents named two such peddlers: Santo Pavan, who had obscene engravings of monks, and Domenico Bruni, who was offering copies of Candido, ossia l’Ottimiso “by Signor Dottor Ralph.” (Bruni had evidently missed Voltaire’s joke.)² Depending on the style of the day, prostitutes wore either elaborate multitiered masks or a simple larva to the theater. A year before the event, noble girls engaged to be married wore masks to walk with their fiancés in public.³ When the French ambassador Pierre-François de Montaigu needed to send an urgent message to a theater director, he sent his young secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a mask.⁴ Keeping perpetual watch over this masked population were armies of internal surveillance agents, who patrolled the gambling dens, sat in theaters, and held vigil in the city’s numerous cafés. Naturally, they were masked.

FIGURE 10. Masked Venetian

In the eighteenth century, masks were the norm in Venice, and they ranged well beyond carnival season for occasions that were far from festive. Visitors wrongly associated the masks with carnival and concluded that Venetians celebrated it six months of the year, a view still common today.⁵ Venetian authorities alone decided when carnival began, which they announced each year by decree. The date rarely fell before January 1. In the eighteenth century, carnival typically lasted about a month. If Easter was late—in 1702, for instance, it was on April 16—carnival might not begin until February.⁶ In Venice, carnival of course meant masks, but masks did not always mean carnival.

As an accepted article of clothing, the mask was simple, cheap, and easily had. It was not a luxury item or an exotic fashion. Most of the time, it was not worn to be mysterious or provocative. Masks admittedly made the arrangements of lovers like Casanova easier and gave spies and criminals a clear advantage. These were a minority. Many more intended no deceit when they reached for their mask. “They go mask’d at all public Performances, and go where they have a mind to it,” a traveler related in 1730. “People go in masks to take the Air, as well as to Plays and Balls, and ‘tis the favaurite Pleasure both of the Grandees and the Community.”⁷ The Englishman John Moore, who visited Venice in 1780 expecting to see a city teeming with jealousy, poison, and the stiletto, wrote with some surprise and a trace of disappointment that he had instead encountered the “innocent mask.”⁸ The diarist Giovanni Rossi, looking back to the fallen Republic, remembered the mask as nobilissima.⁹

From the 1690s until the collapse of the Republic in 1797, the cape-and-mantle combination called the tabàro and baùta, with its characteristic white mask and black hat, was a common feature of the urban landscape. After appearing first among the nobility of both sexes, the fashion quickly spread to all other ranks but the very poorest. Even here there were notable exceptions. Travelers found the city’s masked beggars unsettling. A character in Voltaire’s Princesse de Babylone called the Venetians “a nation of specters.” The Frenchman Maximilien Misson said that the whole town was in disguise.¹⁰

By custom, the period of masking corresponded with the theater season, which began in October, when the wealthy returned from their summer estates on the mainland. Performances were suspended ten days before Christmas and resumed on the twenty-sixth. The winter season ended with Lent. Theaters reopened for seventeen days during the festival of Ascension, which usually fell in May. Venetians wore masks during this short summer theater season, although wearing the tabàro and baùta during these months was infernally hot. Maskers sometimes stripped off the heavy black mantle and let the hood dangle around their necks.

There were periods when masks were explicitly forbidden—during Lent, for the ten days preceding Christmas, and on selected feast days of the Christian calendar—although the prohibition was not consistently observed or enforced. The board that oversaw city commerce allowed mask makers to open their shops only on days when masks were allowed, “and only after the morning ecclesiastical services are over.” Before the late seventeenth century, when masking moved beyond the carnival season, revelers could wear their carnival masks only after Vespers. During carnival, a curfew forbade masks later than four hours after nightfall. As masks spread to the autumn months, officials initially hoped to limit their use to the nighttime hours, but by 1720 daytime masking was common and officially tolerated.¹¹

There were other occasions when Venetians donned masks. Nobles wore masks when they received foreign diplomats, attended the marriage of the doge’s children, or witnessed the installation of church and city officials. They wore masks on designated dates in the religious and civic calendar: on December 26, when the doge heard Mass at San Giorgio Maggiore and later received ambassadors and senators; on April 25, feast day of the city’s patron, St. Mark, when the doge heard Mass in the Basilica and received ambassadors and senators; on June 15, when the doge visited the Church of San Vio in the company of ambassadors to mark the defeat of a plot against the state in 1310; and on July 17, when the doge hosted nobles and guests at a banquet celebrating the reconquest of Padua in the sixteenth century. Nobles and commoners alike wore masks for the three-day celebrations following the election of a new doge or of the powerful procurators of St. Mark. They wore masks to the lavish open houses hosted by foreign governments when new ambassadors arrived. They also wore masks to greet masked heads of state traveling “incognito” with their immense masked entourages.¹²

Paintings from midcentury depict a city brimming with maskers in the tabàro and baùta. In Canaletto’s The Bucintoro Returning to the Molo on Ascension Day, maskers appear on balconies and in windows, lounging on the prows of gondolas or nestled inside, and inside the Bucintoro itself. This glorious golden vessel transported senators, the doge, musicians, and foreign representatives from the ducal palace to waters beyond the Lido for the annual marriage of Venice and the sea. Solemn and celebratory, the ceremony featured none of the high jinks or hilarity that visitors associated with masking in Venice. Nor did the many other state visits, luncheons, and receptions where masks appeared.

That said, there was plenty of masked mischief throughout the year. The mask, tabàro, and baùta were a godsend to smugglers, card sharks, and thieves. Early in the eighteenth century, the conservative senator Pietro Garzoni attributed an upsurge in crime to the new fashion for masks. People were more likely to misbehave, he wrote, with their faces hidden. He was undoubtedly right. In early winter 1756, two men and woman in masks entered a goldsmith’s shop with weapons to demand money and jewels. The same week, a cook who worked for the patrician Angelo Contarini was wounded in the arm by a masker on a bridge near the ducal palace.¹³

The mask brought confusion even when motives were innocent. Lorenzo da Ponte recalls sitting in a café wearing a mask when a gondolier entered and wordlessly summoned him to follow. The boatman led da Ponte to a waiting gondola, where, in darkness, soft hands and a gentle voice greeted him. Da Ponte gamely offered a kiss. The woman, a young aristocrat from Naples, pulled back in horror. Her boatman had made a mistake. “It seeming to me, however, that she was looking upon me with sentiments not unlike those with which I was gazing at her, I took courage and told her all those things which on like occasions one says to a beautiful woman.”¹⁴

A fight erupted between two ladies in a café after a similar misunderstanding. A married couple had entered, the wife masked and the husband not. An acquaintance of theirs arrived, and they spoke; he, too, had planned to meet his wife there. The first husband said he needed to step out—to buy a mask, no less—when, moments later, the second wife arrived, saw her husband with a woman in a mask, and flew into a rage. First came insults, then shoves and slaps. The man returned with his new mask to find his friend trying to separate the women. The scene ended with laughter and apologies.¹⁵ Sometimes the stakes were higher. At an open house, a new emissary from Rome advised guards to bar entrance to anyone masked. As a consequence, some nobles were turned away rudely. It was an embarrassing introduction to local customs.

In general, maskers did not address one another by name. Any indignity or offense was considered more serious when committed against a masker. Piero Tagio, the doorman at one of the city’s theaters, was briefly jailed for insulting a masker. With a mask stuck in the hat and a black cape tossed over the shoulders, an Englishman remarked, one could attend any public assembly. “The reverence accorded to masks in general,” another observed, “prevented infinite disturbances.”¹⁶

To strip someone of his mask was a supreme insult. When that occurred, people responded with stunned horror, as if they had seen an article of clothing torn away. At a high-spirited party with both patricians and commoners present, one masker, a nobleman, recognized another as the innkeeper at the Queen of England. They apparently had some unfinished business. The patrician confronted the man, launched a few choice words, and pulled off his mask and hood. The music suddenly stopped, silence fell, and the host announced that he alone had the authority to unmask a guest. Similar street scenes brought comparable responses. Signora Santa Conti, a commoner, described her humiliation when a neighbor accosted her, tore off her mask, and spewed insults to the effect that she was becoming too friendly with the lady’s lover. “The mask should compel respect in itself,” an indignant Santa Conti later testified. “Just because it coincides with carnival does not make it a plaything for everyone.” The Frenchman Jérôme Richard had evidently seen a similar confrontation. He wrote that the slightest offense to a masker was not tolerated.¹⁷

The mask’s dual association of formality and concealment kept surveillance agents busy. Unsure of intentions and mindful of the threat of espionage, agents of the State Inquisitors spent much of their time watching maskers for secret signals. Whether they were treasonous or innocent wasn’t always clear. During his rounds near St. Mark’s one night in early spring, Francesco Faletti spotted maskers lingering near a casino that belonged to the patrician Sebastiano Venier. Around midnight, the door opened and a boatman came out, followed by two masked women and a servant, who extinguished his lantern and shut the door. A male masker joined the women and called out, “Polpetta!”—“Meatball!”—in a loud voice to his boatman, who responded, “At your service!” All maskers stepped into the gondola and departed. Agent Faletti took no further action.

G. B. Manuzzi, who also worked for the State Inquisitors, described a suspicious exchange in his report of February 24, 1765. He had been trailing the Austrian ambassador’s wife. On Sunday evening, he observed a masker enter the Teatro San Cassiano just before the end of the opera, look directly at the ambassadress in her box, and touch his hand to his mask. “I was unable to understand the significance of this signal,” Manuzzi reported.¹⁸

Masks were so common that a masked agent of the State Inquisitors eavesdropped at length on a conversation between the Spanish ambassador’s son and another masker. The masked Spaniard asked about the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten and was told about Venice’s network of informants. Neither interlocutor stopped to wonder about the masked man standing nearby.¹⁹ This strange scene, which was duly reported to the Inquisitors, is an indication of just how ordinary masks were. So long as you were masked, you didn’t stand out.