Professor Boyde's extremely readable study is a survey of the representation of night and associated themes in the work of some of Italy's greatest painters and poets, including Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, and Petrarch. He shows that this apparently unrewarding and un-Italian theme called forth both fine and eminently characteristic work from each artist in turn, and that this work is quintessentially Italian in its formal perfection, intellectual vigour, and creative use of the past.