Carnival of Venice
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The Carnival of Venice is an annual festival held in Venice, Italy, famous for its elaborate costumes and masks. The Carnival ends on Shrove Tuesday, which is the day before the start of Lent on Ash W
The Venetian Carnival tradition is most famous for its distinctive masks.
Carnival in Venice, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1750
Juliet and her Nurse by J. M. W. Turner, 1863
Typical masks worn at the Venice Carnival, which portray the satirical and exaggerated appearances often used
Visard
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A visard, also known as a vizard, is an oval mask of black velvet which was worn by travelling women in the early modern period to protect their skin from sunburn, as a tan suggested that the bearer w
Carnival of Venice
…woman" in English) was a small strapless black velvet oval mask with wide eyeholes and no lips or mouth worn by patrician women. It derived from the visard mask invented in France in the 16th century, but differed in not having a hole to speak through. The mask was only just large enough to conceal a woman's…
A 16th-century woman wears a visard while riding with her husband.
A woman wearing a visard, as engraved by Abraham de Bruyn in 1581.
A woman wearing a moretta muta appears in this 1751 painting by Pietro Longhi.
Dancers with visards, The Dowager of Bilbao's Grand Ball, 1626, by Daniel Rabel