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This chapter discusses the fall of the Republic in the nineteenth century and the disappearance of masks from Venice society. When the nineteenth century dawned in Venice, the masks which had served as the inscrutable public face of Venice for more than a century vanished as abruptly as the Republic itself. With the invasion of Napoleon, Venice underwent transformations; noble titles were abolished, the National Guard was established, and didactic civic festivals were staged. Carnivals were banned and masks were outlawed. Exceptions were finally made to the banning of masks but only for the highly decent and closely monitored masquerade balls. Carnivals were eventually resumed but with a degree of control and policed. In addition to discussing the changes in Venice and its carnivals after the capitulation, the chapter also discusses Giandomenico Tiepolo’s alternative eulogy for the mask. It discusses his Amusements for Children which depict the race of Pulcinellas living among the ordinary Venetians.

This chapter examines how the intertextual politics of cultural Catholicism manifested itself as aesthetic style in the work of Italian painter Domenico Tiepolo, American popular artist Madonna and Italian American filmmaker Martin Scorsese. The findings reveal that the ethnic and religious differences manifested themselves most compellingly within the intertextual or parodic form, in which implicit dialogues become established between conventional or generic expectations and various forms of narrative deviance. The chapter argues that the attempt to describe religious ethnicity as embodying some kind of idealised or essentialist quality is no longer feasible for any number of theoretical reasons.

This chapter examines the testimony that comes from a dispatch of the Venetian ambassador in Rome, Antonio Tiepolo. It talks about Tiepolo's dispatch that illustrates a sizable network of men who met together on more than one occasion, raising the issue of how these men were apprehended as their activities have become visible to the point of triggering their denunciation. It also emphasizes the agreement between Tiepolo and Michel de Montaigne that the men in Rome performed some kind of wedding ceremony. The chapter elaborates how Tiepolo affirmed that the men got married but he did not specify whether they followed the ritual of a typical wedding between a man and a woman. It includes Tiepolo's statement that the marriage between two men defiled the name of holy matrimony with “alcune lor cerimonie” and by joining together like husband and wife.

This chapter talks about a series of newsletters that were sent from Rome on the arrest of some young men that performed a wedding and went to bed together after getting drunk. It refers to the description of the youths' relations wherein the euphemism coricarsi was used by the author, noting that the association of marrying followed by sex echoes closely the accounts of Michel de Montaigne and Antonio Tiepolo. It also cites the evidence from Rome that attests to the prevalence of more sinister variants of socializing among groups of men. The chapter reviews Marina Baldassari's analysis of cases in which boys were abducted for sexual purposes by older youths or adults. It highlights the cultural scenario of pederastic exploitation, abduction, and rape that reflects the reality of certain aspects of the relations between the members of the group of men and their actions.

This chapter explores the frescoes entitled the Banquet and the Incontro by Giambattista Tiepolo as tribute to both Cleopatra and Isaac Newton's experimental method. The frescoes represent Newton's method as an attempt to associate the spectacle of Cleopatra with the demonstration of truth. The chapter suggests that Tiepolo's frescoes of Cleopatra, which represented her as both queen and whore, are attempts to create an enigmatic image of the Egyptian queen.