MASQUERADE

In case you don't recognise us (we've had rather a lot of worry lately!) this is David and I attending the re-opening-in-new-premises-party of one of our favourite local restaurants, Amici...

Everyone was invited to wear masks so we selected a couple of Venetian ones from our own collection.

As anyone who's ever visited Venice knows, pretty much every other shop sells Venetian masks - many of which - if the naive tourist did but know it - were made a long way from Venice and imported for sale to souvenir-seeking day-trippers!

There are, in fact, only three or four authentic mask-makers left in the city, compared with some three or for hundred mask shops!

And you wouldn't believe how many of them have notices in their windows advising potential purchasers that they were the exclusive providers of masks for Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut. Some even have testimonials from Tom and Nicole. You'd think, bearing in mind what a turkey the film was, that they'd want to keep quite about such an association!

But I digress, the masks we are wearing above were made in Venice - David's in papier mache and mine from leather with horse hair eyebrows!

This be-crystalled confection, on the other hand - despite being offered for sale only a few hundred yards from St Mark's Square, - was made by Swarovski of Austria...

And a great many of the masks on sale don't even carry that pedigree.

However, if you know where to look, you can find authentic mask 'laboratories' where the antique crafts are still practiced...

In such establishments you can buy the beautiful...

Or the beastly...

Or a little something to tickle your fancy...

Once a year, at Carnival (just before the beginning of Lent), the masqueraders take to the campos, calles and bridges and decorate this already elaborately decorative city with outlandish flowerings of exotic costumery and eccentric masks for the benefit of post-card and art-book photographers and the general wonderment of tourists who imagine, quite wrongly, that they are getting a peep at what Venetian life was like back in those rudely, romping days of Casanova and Co.

Never mind, Venice is a theatre and the mask-wearers are - like everyone who visits the city - performers on its stage...

Photos of masks © Brian Sibley, uploaded via flickr. You can see more of my photos of Venice (and elsewhere) on my flickr Photostream.

CITY IN DISGUISE

I remember the very first time, eleven years ago, that we walked along a shopping street in Venice.

"Oh, look!" I said, "Masks!" Two shops further on there was another mask shop and then another and another...

Lest I be thought to exaggerate, I should say that only every other shop in Venice sells masks: the shops in between invariably being given over to selling glass -- although, even then, they may well be selling a few masks as well!

You simply cannot move through Venice without seeing masks but - except for Carnevale (the frolicsome celebrations preceding the beginning of Lent) they are almost always only displayed in shop windows and hardly ever worn!

Originally, masks was not limited to the period of Carnival, but would have been used on numerous occasions as a device to hide the wearer's identity and, possibly, his or her social status: thus allowing a freer interaction with others who might well be of a social - or marital - status that would normally be prohibited by convention. The lover, the thief, the spy might all don the anonymity, license and safety of the mask.

This origin has since been subverted into (at best) a highly attractive and decorative art-form and (at worst) an excuse for peddling cheap tourist-tat.

The masks that were once a common feature of daily life in the grande caffès of the Piazza San Marco were styled after characters from the 16th Century Italian tradition of improvisational theatre, the Commedia dell'Arte ('The Comedy of Artists'); today they are exotic confections of feathers, lace, beads, sequins and other fripperies and can assume the likeness of anyone or anything in the natural (or unnatural) world or, indeed, any region whatsoever within the limitless territory of the human imagination...





You can read more about the history of the Venetian mask - and buy one for yourself (thus saving the bother and expense of having to go to Venice!) at The Venetian Mask Shop.


Images: Brian Sibley & David Weeks © 2006/8 Click on images to enlarge

For more Venice imagery, visit my website to view the album Venice Observed and then follow the links at the foot of that page to three further albums of photographs.