About Our Company
For five hundred years, Venice was the city of masks.
Her people were free to wear masks in public between the festival of Santo Stefano (December 26th) and the start of the carnival season on Shrove Tuesday. Masks were also allowed on The Feast of the Ascension and from October 5th to Christmas, so one could spend a large portion of the year in disguise. Masks were not just for revelry; when voting, citizens wore the bauta to ensure their anonymity. As part of a vital city trade, members of the mask maker’s guild had enjoyed special privileges since 1436.
In 1796, two young mascherari, Jerome Oneire and Agustin Morfei, began promising careers in a Venetian workshop somewhere in the city's Sestiere di Dorsoduro.
Their timing could not have been less fortunate.
One year later, the ancient Republic would fall to warring Austrian and French armies; Venice found itself under Austrian rule. Fearing a revolt, in 1798 the Hapsburg king forbade the wearing of masks in Venice, canceled Carnival, and disbanded the mascherari guild.
City documents show that Morfei, Oneire, and several other mask makers were anonymously reported to the city-state's secret police for detainment and questioning in late 1799. Facing arrest as dissidents, the two young artists chose exile. In the dead of a cold December’s night, they hid aboard the merchant ship Salamandra and fled Venice forever.
History loses the thread here, and fades into myth.
It is said that many lean years passed before Morfei and Oneire would make another mask. The two wandered the forest villages of Dalmatia working as as sign painters, toymakers, woodcutters. Exiled from their families, friends, and the comforts and patronage of Venice, they fell for some time into poverty and despair.
Then one day they met the Forest Things.
​
The destitute mascherari were poaching game in the woods when they encountered their odd soon-to-be patrons. "Strange figures approached us- not quite men and dressed like foreign savages, offering us great wealth in amber, furs and skins, and secrets," wrote Jerome Oneire in the margins of his ledger. "In exchange, Agustin and I would promise to make for them thirteen masks, unlike any we have made before. Each would represent a different animal of the forest. Their Majesties, these cose delle foreste, say they wish to travel among our kind safely and in secrecy. I do not understand, but we are in no position to refuse their largesse."
Morfei and Oneire's ledger confirms the delivery and payment for the thirteen masks, but here their story ends. Where they went with their wealth and secrets is lost to time, but one can imagine a happier ending for them than a life of poaching game.
As for the Forest Things? Perhaps they still walk among us in safety and secrecy, in masks so clever we cannot recognize them.