The annual fair was held in this same way for about five hundred years, during which time it did not occur to any of the Signory that the contrast between the amazing irregularity of the bazaar and the solemn symmetry of the surrounding architecture was disagreeable.
1678.
Then in the Barocco age came artificial taste and set things to rights, and the Senate issued a decree ordering that the shops should be set up in straight lines, and by squares, like Chicago; and it seems to me that about that time the Ascension Fair turned itself into the first Universal Industrial Exhibition. From that time there was a commission established to which all exhibitors were required to send a detailed list of their merchandise. There were no prizes and no medals, yet I have no doubt but that the result was much the same, and that certain houses of merchant-manufacturers made their reputations and their fortunes on the strength of the impression they created at the Venetian Fair.
It was destined to be still more like a modern exhibition. In 1776 the Signory commissioned an architect to put up a vast oval building of wood, like a double portico, looking both inwards and outwards, and almost filling the Square of Saint Mark’s. It was very practically arranged, for to those who sold the more valuable objects shops were assigned on the inside of the oval, where they were better protected, and the shops on the outside, facing the porticoes of the Procuratie, were filled with the more ordinary wares, which would naturally attract more buyers from the lower classes.
On this occasion painters and sculptors exhibited their work, and Canova, who was then but nineteen years old, is said to have shown one of
G. R. Michiel, vol. i. 279.
his earliest groups. But we learn without surprise that the products offered for sale by Venetians
Marble Group, Daedalus and Icarus, Accademia, Room XVII.
were of inferior quality, and that there was a bad contrast between the showy architectural shops and the poor wares they contained. The end was at hand, and Venetian manufacture was dead.
But the people cared not for that, and were as gay and happy over the Fair as their ancestors had been hundreds of years ago. It mattered nothing to them; if the wares were poor, the charlatans who cried them up were wittier than ever. There was one in particular, a certain Doctor Buonafede Vitali of Parma, who employed four celebrated actors, one of whom was Rubini, famous in Goldoni’s companies; they were dressed in the four Italian theatrical masks, and by their clever improvisations and witty sallies they advertised the doctor’s miracles, and amused the clients that waited to be cured by him.