Mark Twain meets a Black tour guide in Mid 19th Century Venice

Mark Twain meets a Black tour guide in Mid 19th Century Venice who introduces him to the Renaissance.......

While reading Paul Kaplan's Contraband guides : Race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the civil war era. I came across the following passage...

Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. In this best-selling 1869 account of a European five hundred published memoirs of European travel and trip taken in 1867, Twain devotes several pages to the guidebooks to an (unnamed) tour guide who introduced him both to the artistic splendors of Venice and to the term “Renaissance.”14 Twain describes this man as the son of South Carolina slaves and at the same time elegant, learned, and fully acculturated to his European environment. 

 

Page 5

Kaplan, P. H. D. (2020). Contraband guides : Race, transatlantic culture, and the arts in the civil war era.Pennsylvania State University Press.

 

I found the actual passage from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad at the Guttenberg Library

THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

by Mark Twain

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm

 

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of the beautiful, whatsoever. It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation. This very thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice. In every single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the remark:

 

“It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance.”

 

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I had to simply say,

 

“Ah! so it is--I had not observed it before.”

 

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring of a South Carolina slave. But it occurred too often for even my self-complacency, did that exasperating “It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance.” I said at last:

 

“Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

 

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of art. The guide said that after Titian’s time and the time of the other great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it partially rose again--an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these shabby pictures were the work of their hands. Then I said, in my heat, that I “wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years sooner.” The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge enough in martyrs.

 

The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew anything. He was born in South Carolina, of slave parents. They came to Venice while he was an infant. He has grown up here. He is well educated. He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires of talking of her illustrious career. He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite. Negroes are deemed as good as white people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land. His judgment is correct.