on a gondola. Towards the end, the singer meets a man wearing a lion mask who carries her into a bed. In the final shot, the couple rides off together in a gondola, and the video ends with the New York skyline. "Like a Virgin" was added to MTV on the week of November 10, 1984. In 1986, the song's performance from the Madonna Live: The Virgin Tour release was published as a video and nominated for Best Choreography at the MTV Video Music Awards. Five years later, the performance from the Madonna: Truth or Dare documentary was also released as a music video and received nominations at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards. The official video can be found on Madonna's video compilations The Immaculate Collection (1990), and Celebration: The Video Collection (2009). Reception and analysis The video was generally well received by critics. For The Independent, Ben Kelly pointed out that, "her ambition is on full display [on the video]. As the camera cuts between her eyes and those of a lion, it's hard to tell who looks hungrier"; he named it one of Madonna's ten best music videos. "Like a Virgin" was considered the singer's eight best video by Idolators Mike Neid, who referred to it as a "timeless release". Louis Virtel placed it in the 27th position of The Backlot's ranking of the singer's music videos. Ferraro called it "funny, funky and bright". Georges-Claude Guilbert, in Madonna as Postmodern Myth (2015), highlighted the "games with carnival masks, men, lions and 'werelions', [and] allusions to eighteenth-century practices", adding that it was an "extremely sexy" clip. Author Michael Campbell concluded that with the video, Madonna created "the formula that would set the tone for her subsequent work: combine provocative, shocking and controversial themes and images with bright, accessible music". Author Margaret Plant noted the expression of Venetian vitality in the video, writing that "old sacrosanct Venice was propelled into a pop world of high-energy gyration, and endless circulation". Tom Bromley wrote that the lion represented Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice; Plant also noted references to Saint Mark, adding that Madonna appeared to "stretch the boundaries of tolerance in the video", since Saint Mark represented a time in Venice when acts such as homosexuality and fornication were a capital offense. Plant also wrote that the scene in which the masked man carries Madonna, symbolized an instance of