This paper reads David Foster’s comic novel, Testostero (1987), in terms of a postcolonial anxiety about art and culture. Foster’s novel begins and ends in Venice, a city full of art created at the peak of a lost empire, and it adapts elements of Goldoni’s Venetian Twins to its comedy of colonialism. It contrasts the crude attitudes of Noel Horniman, the Australian poet from Marrickville with the aesthetic good taste of his twin brother Leon Hunnybun, an effete intellectual raised as an aristocrat in Britain. The brothers meet in Venice and exchange places so that Leon experiences the vulgar physical life of Australia and Noel the sterile intellectual atmosphere of Britain, before returning to Venice to discover their true parenthood, and a third sibling. In the novel, Foster both expresses and mocks his own longstanding anger at British cultural imperialism over Australia. While each twin fails in his adopted role, Venice offers a third way, a place where a robust physical life can be lived amid the art of the past. The novel mimics the comic traditions of each culture while giving full play to Foster’s own sense of self-mockery and farce. It includes references to the use of twins for nature/nurture experiments, and it incorporates the Italian migration to Australia as part of its farcical plot. The paper argues that Foster’s comparison of British, Australian and Venetian artistic/comic traditions overturns an Australian sense of colonial inferiority in relation to Britain and proposes that an empire that has ended offers the greatest freedom.