Two marble statues, each representing a reclining, sleeping nude of somewhat indeterminate sex, sit at the heart of Swinburne's early collections of poetry: the Hellenistic Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Figure 1) in his Poems and Ballads (1866) and Michelangelo's allegorical figure La Notte (Figure 2) in his “In San Lorenzo” sonnet in Songs before Sunrise (1871). Swinburne's dealings with the Hermaphrodite have had a long and ever increasing bibliography; his fascination with Michelangelo's sculpture has, to my knowledge, not yet provoked much scholarly attention. This imbalance may partly be ascribed to the immediate sex appeal of the Hermaphrodite – this “late Romantic freak,” as Camille Paglia appropriately called it (413) – which in the gendered critical discourse of the 1990s has given rise to a whole range of exciting explorations of Swinburne and the body, Swinburne and androgyny, Swinburne and poetic blindness. The Michelangelo statue was, however, turned into a poetic and political monument by Swinburne under far less erotically charged circumstances in the volume dedicated to Guiseppe Mazzini, and opens for different routes of inquiry.