When I would say and prove that it was absurd to believe in the existence of nothingness, he would call me a fool.
Giacomo Casanova
Date of publication : 20.4.20
Last week, we approached our subject from what we call an ‘historical’ perspective. This approach is extremely interesting but it will only get us so far, for kissing cannot simply be understood through my process of rigorous argument, cool logic and a forensic grasp of the olden days. Why? Because this traditional historiological approach ignores all those kisses in history that have not happened at all. Why? Because something (or someone) got in the way.
Let me give you an example:
Think of kissing someone now. But you cannot go and kiss this person because you are at your studies.
Your studies are in the way.
Think of someone else. There is, perhaps, a wall between you and the object of your kiss.
The wall is in the way.
Now, imagine you are in your local supermarket. You see a pretty person and you want to run up and kiss them, but they are wearing a mask.
The mask is in the way…
This brief exercise should begin to give you a sense of how many kisses don’t happen in the world. It’s mindblowing when you really start to think about it. So today we are going off piste - to approach our subject from what we call a phenomenonological perspective. Phenomenonologists believe that things are defined by the absence of what they are not. So today we shall consider a kiss through its absence and what it isn’t. Why it didn’t. And who.
All in the context of that most mysterious of cities - Venice.
Here we go.
WALL
A wall is a barrier built by human hand. Great civilisations, like China or (more recently) America, are very fond of building walls. Walls are built primarily for protection: from war, weather and wild beasts. Walls have also historically been constructed to prevent unwanted kissing.
The ancient story of Pyramus and Thisbe deals with just this phenomenon. Pyramus and Thisbe were from warring Babylonian families but they were very much in love. Their parents built a wall to stop them kissing each other. Inevitably, Pyramus and Thisbe found a hole in the wall and started kissing that instead.
PYRAMUS: O Kiss me through the hole of this vile wall.
THISBE: I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.
(Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Unsatisfied with their absence of kissing, Pyramus and Thisbe ran into nature to kiss each other in real life. Sadly, a lion got in the way, and both Pyramus and Thisbe ended up dead.
Pyramus and Thisbe : lovers defined by the absence of their kiss.
CITY WALLS
The oldest city wall in the world is the wall of Jericho (circa 8000 BCE) which famously got in the way of the Israelites until it tumbled down. This event was very popular and so the wall even got it’s own song, and then every city started building their own walls and singing their own songs. Thus civilisation continued until 421 AD when the strangest of cities was conceived.
Venice.
La Serenissima Repubblica.
Foolishly, someone put Venice in the middle of the sea, so it was not possible to build a wall around her. Her streets drifted damply into the wide blue yonder. Along these watery routes of commerce, kisses too drifted - with the silk and with the spice. On the canals, in the bays… kisses, kisses everywhere…
Until the beginning of the thirteenth century…
What happened then?
THE VENETIAN MASK
Around the beginning of the thirteenth century, Venetians began to wear masks almost all the time. As you will remember, this was when Venice breached the walls of Constantinople, winning the fourth crusade to much acclaim.
The theory is that the Venetian soldiers went all the way to Constantinople and they encountered many Byzantine beauties on the way - women who covered their faces with veils. The Venetians, it is said, were transfixed by this phenomenon and so they came home from their wars, covered their faces, and were never seen again.
THE VENETIAN MASK : LARVA
Have a look at the squares above.
One of them has a Venetian mask in it.
Can you spot which one?
Have another look.
(Answer : 4)
This mask is what we call a ‘spooky’ mask. It is the iconic mask of Venice. Its technical name is the LARVA which in Latin means a spirit returned from the dead to haunt the living. More recently, of course, Larva has come to mean a bug that has yet to be born. In either case, its roots are clear : the LARVA signifies something that is not fully present.
Not really there.
Something that either was or will be present.
A ghost.
Venetians could turn into ghosts by placing the LARVA mask onto their face. They held the mask in place with a hat which had three corners. If your hat fell off, your mask would fall off too. So three cornered hats were very important indeed.
But why would people want to become ghosts? What are the benefits of being a ghost? Here are a few reasons why you might choose to wear a ghostly mask if you were Venetian :
Perhaps you want to slip around the city undetected.
Perhaps you want to have sex without being seen by your wife or your husband.
Perhaps you want to have sex with a man and you are a man and the church says that is a sin.
Perhaps you are Jewish and you want to study at the academy or visit a nightclub but the law requires you to be home by six.
Perhaps you have a spot on your nose.
Perhaps you want to look cool. In Medieval Venice, members of the town council put on these masks for formal meetings and called themselves the ‘Council of the Invited’, which they all agreed sounded far more cool than ‘the town council’.
Perhaps you are a merchant of the city and you have lost all your money on the high seas or at one of the numerous casinos. You are to be found begging on a corner by the Rialto, your face hidden by the white anonymity of the LARVA.
As ghosts, all are free, all are equal, all are brothers.
Death : The Serene Republic.
POOR FRANCESCO CERRATO
When you wear a LARVA mask, it is actually easy to believe yourself to be in another dimension -
But BEWARE!
You feel that you possess the invulnerability of immortality -
But BEWARE!
You are not immortal. If you don’t believe me, put on your LARVA and look in a mirror - look straight into your bloodshot eyes and let them remind you. You are made of flesh and fear. You are made of hunger and hiccups. You want to touch people. You want to press your lips to the lips of another warm fleshy fearful body so you go to rip off your mask -
But BEWARE!
Remember poor Francesco Cerrato.
One day in the 15th century, Francesco Cerrato went out for a walk. It was the height of Carnival. What a strange sight met his eyes! For the streets, the bridges, the piazzas were bursting with dancing cats! In fact, these were not real cats, but boys wearing cat masks and dancing about like cats in a way that was strikingly reminiscent of the recent movie, CATS. These cat boys were called the GNAGNE of Venice (GNA GNE translating perhaps as MIAO MIAO). The GNAGNE made Francesco Cerrato’s blood pump with joy and he had loads of fun and sex but, in a moment of sheer folly, he threw his hat into the air and let his mask fall down and he kissed his lover full on the lips with no shame.
The council recognised poor Francesco Cerrato, prosecuted him for sodomy, hanged him between the two towers of Piazzetta San Marco and then burnt him at the stake until he was ash.
Until he had no face at all.
THE MASK OF VENICE : MORETTA
The MORETTA is a dark mask.
The Dark Lady.
The Mooretta of Venice.
The MORETTA was worn by ladies to protect their faces from sunlight and from men.
The MORETTA is held on the face by gripping a button between the teeth.
Night and Silence.
The patriarchs of Venice liked to keep their daughters behind these little dark walls.
But these walls, like the walls of the cities of Jericho or Constantinople, invited dreams of conquest.
A would-be lover sees the MORETTA and asks himself - What is behind that mask and can I kiss it?
But BEWARE!
Remember poor Pyramus. He tried to get around a wall and kiss his Thisbe, but a lion got in the way and they both ended up dead.
A CRACK IN THE WALL : ARTS OF A COURTESAN
In the census of 1508, one in ten Venetians was registered as a professional courtesan.
Gosh - you say - they must have been everywhere!
Well they weren’t. They were in the Carampagne di Rialto district. For since 1412, the prostitutes of the city were confined to the district of the Carampagne di Rialto, with the exception of Saturday afternoons, when they could potter out into the town. But on these occasions, they were required to wear a distinctive uniform:
A regulation prostitute yellow scarf.
Regulation prostitute shoes, with soles at least 50cm high.
The Patricians of Venice had their rules. Daughters behind MORETTA masks. Prostitutes behind the walls of the Carampagne or in silly shoes.
But of course, things were complicated by an age-old problem : the sneakiness of women. And no women were sneakier than the courtesans of the Carampagne. They were artists of sneakiness as much as they were artists of sex. They were, in fact, artists in many ways. Some were painters. Some painted their faces white and painted their lips red and painted their hair, too - an exact shade of red called ‘Titian red’ that the tourists adored because it made them look like men’s paintings. They wore funny noses and fake moustaches. They were impressionists before the impressionists. They put little red lanterns on the noses of their gondolas to create a district of red lights - the original red light district. Many were brilliant musicians, such as singer-songwriter Barbara Strozzi, whose hit song What Can I Do you might remember from lesson one. In fact, some Venetian Courtesans were so famed for their music that we historians can find it hard to determine whether or not they sold sex at all.
Was Barbara Strozzi a famous prostitute who happened to be a brilliant musician, or was she a famous musician who enjoyed a good night out?
Spot the difference, History.
Not so easy.
These sneaky women sometimes disguised themselves and snuck out of the Carampagne de Rialto. Apparently, they sometimes dressed up like the virgin daughters of the Patricians of Venice, in long white veils with MORETTA masks gripped between their teeth. But this was not entirely successful, for one afternoon, a member of the town council spotted the unmistakable swing of dirty little Rosetta from the whore-house behind a white veil and he called up his friends and they made a decree :
A courtesan found wearing a mask outside the walls of the Carampagne district, shall be tied between the pillars of the Piazzetta de San Marco for two hours or lashed through the streets from San Marco to the Ponte di Rialto. Then fined five hundred lire. Then banished for four years.
And. For clarity:
A fake moustache is a mask.
They wrote that down. The edict of 1608. A sad day for moustaches.
As you may imagine, the courtesans of the Carampagne were not gracious in defeat. They carried on as they were. The councillors huffed and they puffed but eventually a Titian-haired madam got one of them where she wanted him and spat these words in his ear :
‘I can tell you one thing. The Russian prince doesn’t come to Venice for you. He comes for me. The streams of tourists don’t come for you. They come for me. You’re living in the past, you incompetent fucking morons - Venice doesn’t run the silk road any more. We prostitutes pay our taxes and support your warships and we want to have fun without fear of the whip.’
She was right and he knew it. So he sort of nodded in that mean spirited way that council men sometimes do and said, ‘Alright, you can go beyond the walls of the Carampagne to the opera but you still aren’t allowed to wear masks’.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA
So it was that the courtesans of the Carampagne entered the Theatre La Felice that night. They took their seats in a box above the stage, looking resplendent with their gorgeous skin and their gorgeous red lips and their nipples rouged to match their vibrant Titian hair.
They were not wearing masks, of course. Masks for prostitutes were not permitted.
No buttons between their teeth.
The curtain came up, but the men in the auditorium had by that point completely lost track of what was going on. They had lost track of what theatre was, they forgot to look at the stage, they didn’t know what was up or down. They simply could not take their eyes off the dazzling smiles and full lips of the ladies of leisure. The theatre was in uproar… And so, humiliated, the gentlemen of the council were now forced into a volte-face decree:
Every women, on entering the foyer of the Theatro La Felice, must be masked.
Bare-faced prostitution will not be tolerated.
The courtesans laughed, blew a kiss to the crowd, winked at the castrato, covered their faces and were never seen again…
Date of publication : 20.4.20