JAMES H. JOHNSON. Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic.

Abstract

Reading James H. Johnson's book is a little like hurrying through Venice's maze of narrow alleys and open squares: sharp turns and unexpected sights seem to pop up out of nowhere, as do elegant palaces bathed in golden light. There are twenty-one chapters here, some only a few pages long, and several of these touch but lightly on the subject of Venetian masks. Instead, the reader is immersed in a world of dizzying stimuli, from the blood sport of bull chases to gambling halls where merriment and desperation could be thinly veiled by government regulation. All of these chapters address, from different angles, the role of spectacle in eighteenth-century Venetian society. Masks were a critical ingredient in this mix. In the central part of the book, Johnson traces the shift in mask-wearing, or “masking,” from a tool of deception to a strategy for maintaining the status quo. He argues that while the Venetian mask of today is associated with revelry and disguise, in eighteenth-century Venice it had become a means by which the upper classes could indulge their insatiable appetite for spectacle without actually renouncing the status and privileges that the Venetian elites held so dear. Rather than permitting those elites to engage in “topsy-turvy” behavior that actually challenged social boundaries, Johnson portrays the mask as part of a tradition of cultural protection, like the veils that elite women had worn in public for centuries.