Carnevale :-)

I have some friends who visited Venice recently, and are still pining about the fact that they had to leave again.

I'd like to dedicate this little Trouvaille to them, and my Venetian friends, who have the good luck to live in a place where beauty is omnipresent.

"Happy and careless lives the Venetian of his sunshine and his mussels, bathed his canals, follows processions, sings his love under a easy and calm sky, and regards his carrnaval as one of the wonders of the world."



I don't know about you, but reading about the Carnevale in 1804 (when 1797 was reputedly the last) makes me smile :-)

As does this picture of two happy friends sitting at Florian's on a morning during Carnevale :-)

 

The single sheets

We all have seen these sad prints, where on the left side of the paper we can make out that it was once upon a time part of a bound volume. Sometimes that edge get cut away, either by readers who used their magazines much the same way we do today. Or later on by print dealers, who's financial interest purely lies with the print.

The print of the left has no markings, while the one on the right shows where it was sewn together with the other pages of its journal

But we ought not to forget, that already in the time period, print dealers sold individual prints, what were never bound, and I'm tickled pink to have found another such reference in the Journal des dames (early January 1804):

Recently an edition of four pages of flowers, printed in colour on good paper and retouched by hand is aw available at Vilquin, the print dealer located at Grand Cour du Palais du Tribunat. These flowers, united in bouquet by twelve to fifteen on every page, are especially designed for young ladies who busy themselves with the drawing of ornamentation, embroider or paint on fabric.

A text of forty to fifty lines comes with every colour print.

The price of the full edition is 24fr. Single pages, without text, cost you 6fr.

Trouvaille: Dancing is soo complicated and tiring these days...

That's January 16, 1804

Dancing today is so complicated, so intricate and fatiguing, that in an assembly twenty good dancers meet four good gentlemen dancers: after five or six years of training, a dancer is exhausted; the ladies, who are more graceful by making less of an effort, or rather to whom this kind of exercise is more favorable, the ladies, as I say, are dancing well, dancing much and are dancing for a long time.