A compact scrapbook of sixteenth-century Europe, L'Oeuvre au noir will delight historians of this period. Marguerite Yourcenar's vision encompasses the whole changing scene of human activity, with its violence and horror, simplicity and intrigue, the ignorance and superstition of the poor severely contrasted with the hypocrisy of the ecclesiastical and new merchant classes, at a time when the development of travel and trade was leading the way to a reawakening of the inquiring mind.

All this has been condensed with considerable skill to a novel form which, if classical in conception, is of a style no longer found in present-day novels. With ordered precision L'Oeuvre au noir is divided into three parts, the subdivisions of which correspond to stages in the travels of a fictional hero, Zénon, an alchemist-philosopher from Bruges, modelled on the lives of Erasmus and Colet among others, in his quest for "the truth". Cartesian in method, he rejects all that he has been taught in order to pursue his own inquiry from his only certainty, which is himself.

Marguerite Yourcenar would seem to be conducting a meticulous exercise in the development of the human mind once freed from the conventions and prejudices of its early environment. Her primary interest in her hero, therefore, is intellectual: thus we do not see him develop as a human being. He is denied warmth and fallibility. We do not see other characters or events through his eyes; rather he remains a distant figure for whom scenes and family ties are constructed in order to allow him an entrance so that the discourse may begin. Zénon reminds us more of those flat, clearly outlined and carefully painted figures that emerge towards the forefront of a crowded Flemish painting of the period. And, as Marguerite Yourcenar acknowledges with honesty in fourteen pages of notes on sources, these paintings, particularly those of Bosch, have indeed had much influence on her writing.