Replete with interesting, deftly reconstructed case studies mined from the Venetian archives, James H. Johnson's Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic provides a comprehensive look at the historical theory and practice of masking in Venice, a tradition that flourished from the thirteenth century until the fall of the Republic in 1797. The central question Johnson poses is whether the act of wearing masks was truly liberating for Venetians, or simply a way to preserve the standing social order. Through an exploration of mask usage in venues ranging from the theatre, to the academy, to the public piazza, he ultimately argues that, in contrast to the modern employment of masks as tools of deception or disguise, masking in Venice was largely a conservative practice, since “[r]ather than obscuring identities, masks affirmed their permanence” (xii).

In twenty-one brief chapters—most ranging from a mere five to ten pages—Johnson presents the reader with a broad chronology, often skipping around in time from page to page and chapter to chapter. This structure is at once appealing and puzzling: the quickly read chapters and Johnson's pleasurable anecdotal style make it easy for the reader to pick up or put down the book at will, but this choppy arrangement also makes it difficult at times to follow the trajectory of the book's overarching argument and timeline. Aside from this critique, Johnson's book has much to offer—on a phenomenon that is at once cultural, social, and political—to both scholars and students in disciplines historical, theatrical, and performative.

From the outset, Johnson separates Venetian masking into two distinct realms: one, as it pertains to the festive and theatrical, the other, as it pertains to the everyday. The book is divided into four parts that retain this distinction. Part 1, “The Carnival of Venice,” and Part 4, “Carnival and Community,” deal almost exclusively with Venetian carnival, whereas Part 2, “The Culture of Masking,” and Part 3, “The Honest Mask,” treat the daily culture of masking more broadly. Readers may be surprised to learn that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, Venetians donned masks in their daily lives for six months of the year. While this seems to point to a populace bent on deception beyond circumscribed times of festivity, Johnson's conclusions are more nuanced. He distinguishes, for example, between the sober use of masks in the eighteenth century by diplomats, theatre spectators, and gamblers, and the more theatrical aspects of masking associated with carnival festivity and the antics of characters on the commedia dell'arte stage.

Theatre scholars will find Chapters 8, 9, 12, 13, and 16 of particular interest. Chapter 8, “Infernal Associations,” and Chapter 9, “Devil's Dance,” trace the mask's diabolical associations, including connections to Dionysus, the Greek god of the theatre who has dealings with the underworld, as well as to the mischievous Harlequin/Arlecchino of commedia fame. Johnson sees the commedia mask as serving a dual function, both distancing the actor from his persona (“open[ing] a space in the viewer's imagination for fiction, which gave the actor license to offend” [76]), as well as familiarizing the audience visually with stock commedia characters. Chapter 12, “Legislating Morality,” and Chapter 13, “Saving Face,” prove once again how Venice's permanent theatres served as important social gathering sites for locals and foreigners alike beginning in the seventeenth century. Johnson traces shifting regulations regarding masks worn by theatre spectators to demonstrate how Venetians’ social mores fluctuated over time. He concludes that early rules requiring noble men and women to wear masks to the theatre reveal the Republic's struggle to separate its classes visibly and to hang on to its social order. Later rules (in the eighteenth century) mandating that first prostitutes and then all women don masks when in the audience point to increased concerns with gender differences, and particularly with questions of female immodesty in public spaces. Those interested in the theatrical war between the eighteenth century's two great Venetian playwrights, the conservative Carlo Gozzi and the progressive Carlo Goldoni (who unmasked his actors), will find an excellent overview of the battle in Chapter 16, “Taming the Devil.” Gozzi's more favorable reception by Venetian audiences further bolsters Johnson's claim that the use of masks, whether by characters onstage or by nobles in the audience, was motivated by a Venetian desire “to preserve hierarchy and protect distinction” (166).

Finally, those interested exclusively in carnival and the carnivalesque will not be disappointed: Johnson challenges prior universalist theories of these and of ritual masking, thereby redefining how we come to understand the particularities of Venetian carnival. However, those searching for an in-depth discussion of how his study relates to identity formation theories, (such as those of Burkhardt and Greenblatt concerning Renaissance self-fashioning), will find this text somewhat lacking, as will those interested in Johnson's perspective on how his study intersects with performance theory, especially theories (such as those of Goffman, Butler, and others) of the everyday performance of identity and gender. For example, Johnson's brief yet provocative accounts of Venetian gnaghe, cross-dressers who gave impromptu performances throughout the city, would have benefited from a more theoretical treatment. While rich in anecdotal detail (see especially pages 192–202 for an expertly constructed historical anecdote about a card shark from Verona who disguised himself in order to fleece Venetian nobility), the book does leave one wondering about the more practical/artisanal sides of masking in Venice: Who were the mask makers? How did they practice their craft? Where did one go to buy a mask, how much did it cost, and did Venetians own more than one? As a thriving, international trade city, Venice must still harbor the answers to these basic questions in its archives.

Through a reexamination of Venetian carnival and the practice of masking, Venice Incognito turns on its head the long-standing notion of early modern Venice as a rowdy, libertine city destined for downfall. Although it begins and ends with tales of the slippery Casanova, this book ultimately proves him to be an outlier—a man before his time—and an exception to the largely conservative practice of Venetian masking wherein identity was fixed in the bloodline and the use of a mask did not refashion the self, but instead only reaffirmed and protected it.