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celebrated collection gathered together by Paolo Giovio at Como.2 Here these subjects were not placed in a library or indeed in an academic in- stitution but formed part of a far more extensive series of great men worthy of emulation. Like the many series of portraits of rulers, providing a visual representation of continuity through lin- eage, such groups of `worthies’ were to be found in many public spaces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poggio Bracciolini in his De nobilitate (1440) had indeed recommended the emulation of Roman practices in setting up images of wise men as exemplars.3 How- ever, as Justus Lipsius had already recognized in 1602, representations of authors were especial- ly relevant in the setting of a library.4 Gathering together the references made by classical auth- ors to portraits in libraries, Lipsius had regret- ted that this had not been adopted in modern times. This was, however, soon to change. In the early 1600s the Bodleian Library in Oxford was decorated by an extensive series of painted au- thor portraits, and by the late seventeenth cen- tury, series of author portraits were becoming a familiar way of arranging images in a library, just as the bust had become almost a natural way of celebrating authorial fame. It was above all in the eighteenth century that these two traditions – that of representing famous men in series and that of representing authors in the form of busts – took on its most visible and familiar form. This was the Enlightenment library populated by busts of writers where such images served as exemplars for the members of an academic in- stitution. This paper will focus on the use of au- thor busts in one particular case – the Wren Li- brary at Trinity College, Cambridge.5 But before turning to this eighteenth-century academic li- brary with its series of exemplary busts of writers and scholars, something needs to be said about the changing place of the bust as a genre in the eighteenth century. Portrait busts had of course occupied a prominent place in visual culture from the Ren- aissance onwards, and the expressive power of the bust had been richly exploited long before the eighteenth century, not least in the hands of Bernini. But the busts of Bernini and Algardi are in a sense exceptions in the way that they functioned as independent images. More often busts formed part of architectural settings and were viewed from afar or were integral compon- ents of funerary monuments. During the eight- eenth century, however, the bust became both more prominent and even ubiquitous, especial- ly in France and Britain. The bust emerged from its niche to become an independent form.6 At the same time, it became far more ambitious aes- thetically. No longer an image to be glanced at from afar, the bust was increasingly viewed close- ly, an image to be given concentrated and sus- tained attention. Correspondingly, the way in which busts – especially in Britain and France – were finished changed. Surfaces became more subtly modulated; their details, gradations of plane and the carving of the marble more high- ly worked; their execution being predicated on the viewer’s close attention. These shifts were in part associated with a new engagement on the part of at least some viewers with the processes malcolm baker198 2 F. Haskell, History and its Images, New Haven / London 1991, pp. 26–79. 3 P. Bracciolini, De vera nobilitate (ed. D. Canfora), Rome 2002. 4 J. Lipsius, De Bibliothecis Syntagma, Antwerp 1602. 5 This paper draws on material presented in more detail in M. Baker, The Portrait Sculpture, in: The Making of the Wren Library (ed. D. McKitterick), Cambridge 1995, pp. 110–137. 6 For a fuller discussion of this phenomenon, see M. Baker, The Marble Index. Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain, New Haven / London 2014, especially pp. 13–25. The Trinity College busts are dis- cussed on pp. 301–318. Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR