Venice, for some centuries, was a real-life graveyard of faceless ghosts; all of whom were draped head to toe in stifling black cloth.
The Italian Carnevale Festival masks are some of the most delightful souvenirs one can take home from a holiday in Venice. Shockingly, the original masks used to have nothing to do with the vibrant Carnevale, but were blank and rather dead-looking. From the 14th to 18th centuries, Venetians regularly wore masks that looked more or less like this one:
These masks were called Bauta. They were, in fact, worn as an everyday item of clothing, at all times of the year except during the festival. Paired with the mask would be a long black coat which covered a person’s entire height, a black hood, and a three-pointed black hat. Read that again: Yes, Venice for some centuries was a real-life graveyard of faceless ghosts, all of whom were draped head to toe in stifling black cloth.
That description was possibly a little cruel and unfair. Venice at the time of the masks’ popularity was truly a city of extreme economic activity, political power, and leisure. The city’s very foundation depended on its trade over the Mediterranean, and it was really good at keeping up.
The precise beginning of the Bauta mask is not clear. One appealing theory is that it came from the suffering of the Black Death. It didn’t matter who you were or what you did: you entered the lottery with exactly one ticket. If you lost, you were killed by the Plague. A third of the population lost.
You could have called the Black Death a twisted form of equality. A brutal reminder that, yes, you could be rich, powerful, a believer, a sinner — no one was exempt from death and misfortune. This killed the spirits of nobles and led to the end of a ritual that dated back to the Roman Republic. When nobles had funerals, they would wear “death masks” of their ancestors (face models made by pressing wax over the faces of the deceased,) to honor the link between the present and the past. Dr. Mirjam Schaub, Professor of Philosophy at University of Art and Design Halle in Germany, suggests that the white Bauta masks arose as a form of protest by the nobles of Venice against the sudden death of tradition. The new masks were, in the beginning, a struggle to take back the hierarchy in which the nobles used to benefit out of, protected from social equalizing bulldozers like an epidemic.
Ironically, the masks were to soon become a symbol of equality and personal freedom. Historian Ignazio Toscani suggests that the rise and “uncanny popularity” of the Bauta stemmed from the very “versatility of its use and the ambiguity of its functions.” Nevertheless, people wore the masks in such a way that they drifted toward mainly two functions: to secure freedom through anonymity and to cultivate peace.
Wearing the Bauta, along with the black garments cloaking the rest of the body, one’s identity was entirely hidden from the public. Even one’s gender was impossible to tell. Anonymity meant that you weren’t expected to behave in a certain way which would represent your social class and occupation. People were free to roam around anywhere in the city and were perfectly okay interacting with anyone, transcending social barriers and social codes that in other European cities at the time, remained a massive looming presence.
Since no one could tell who you were behind your mask, blackmailing for political purposes was off limits. You couldn’t even spot the man who borrowed your money and never gave it back. When aristocrats had to beg for money — there were surprisingly many such cases — they could do so without once losing face. Thus, the Bauta made sure no one was above anyone, that the playing field was constantly kept at a state of absolute levelness.
On one hand, this sort of society sounds quite collectivistic — in essence, you aren’t held accountable for your actions or socioeconomic status. But under this pretense, Venetians were onto something totally different. By keeping up an appearance of equality, says Dr. Schaub, “diversity and a variety of desires could in fact blossom and flourish.” There weren’t any social codes when there were no social identities. You could ask for what you wanted; purchase, barter, auction off. It is a social philosophy akin to what we might see in modern free market societies.
This is not surprising once you consider that these Venetians could build a ship under one day and had the technology that went unmatched until the Industrial Revolution. In this light, the Bauta – an unassuming piece of streetwear at face value – could have been a central force in Venice’s economic engine.
Talk about unassuming pieces of streetwear…We have had exactly that become everyday fashion since 2020. There’s a funny parallel between the Bauta and the face masks we are now wearing — both are results of a deadly epidemic.
As waves of the pandemic keep crashing upon us, our lives have retreated further into our private quarters. Some days, the only real-life encounter I would have outside of my family is with the grocer. Everything else is conducted on Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, take your pick. And you must admit, Zoom is a strange substitute for a real-life conversation. How often do you talk to someone face-to-face with a mirror stuck in front of you, constantly reminding you of your aesthetic deficiencies?
“Mirror anxiety” now plagues those on constant video calls, after becoming obsessed with “ imperfections that they’ve noticed onscreen.” Even with our cameras on, there’s no way to tell if people are paying an ounce of their attention. You can only expect them to be listening, while we ourselves keep our faces completely straight and doodle, memorize city names on the map across the room, open Instagram on a separate tab, obsess over our asymmetrical eyeliner. The Internet has changed what our faces are. We’ve become more self-conscious of them, like fashion — cleverly choosing what to express and what to conceal.
You’ve noticed that, with masks, it gets even easier. I, for one, have mastered how to smile (or show that I wish to smile, or that I would smile if I had the mask off) with a light narrowing of the eyes. In the unbearable summer heat, my mouth is constantly open behind my mask like that of a dying fish strung out of the water. When some joke warrants laughter and it isn’t funny, I can now produce a laughter-like noise without twitching a muscle.
Wearing a mask in the streets feels strangely private. Even when I’m in the largest of crowds, there’s a slight sense of peace in knowing that half of my face is covered up. It feels like I’ve retained a small, quiet, intimate space to myself devoid of any weird viruses, as the immediate outside world teems with diseases and disease-carrying people and chaos. But whenever I do have a conversation with someone in public, I feel myself leaning into it, listening to their voice with more attention to compensate for what I can’t see through their masks. I focus on what’s being spoken, what ideas are begging to be communicated, on what grounds I am required to connect with them as a separate human, living behind their separate little mask.
I wonder if this is what they felt, too — the Venetians of another era. That by hiding their visual features, they could forget themselves for a second, and connect with someone else on a deeper, more intimate level. For some reason, the thought comforts me, like shining a light on a nightmare. The faceless COVID streetscape doesn’t have to be dystopian. After all, covering one’s face was the chosen method of interaction for the inhabitants of one prosperous city in history.
Lyon Nishizawa
Contributor
Lyon is a lifelong traveler, who looks at each destination as her next classroom and playground. She is fascinated by the stories, music, and languages of the world. Her parents are Japanese, but she spent her childhood in multiple cultures and identifies as a third culture kid.
