Page - 151 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

singularity / integration While bust portraits clearly celebrate the tran- sient individual in an enduring form, they have also since Roman antiquity been exponents of ancient lineage and genealogy. Individuality and homogeneity of family representation were closely intertwined, in particular in Republican Rome and again in the Renaissance, both per- iods in which galleries of busts were common.8 Series of busts portraying eminent thinkers of the past and present came fully in vogue in the eighteenth century, with ambitious projects such as the commission of twenty-six marble busts for Trinity College in Cambridge, of which ten were executed by Roubiliac between 1751 and 1766.9 The Vienna University’s Arkadenhof with its 150 monuments to illustrious scholars and thinkers of the late nineteenth century marks an ambi- tious peak in the development of such galleries of bust portraits of famous men (and quite rarely, women) as far as their number is concerned, but also in their variety of types.10 Based on ideas not unlike those of painted galleries of uomini illus- tri and donne famose, so popular in palazzi, resi- dences and town halls all over Europe since the fourteenth century, the gallery display of series of busts (in the case of Vienna, a pantheon of emi- nent scholars) harks back to the warp and weft of early modern ruler representation – emper- ors, princes, mercenaries and wealthy merchants who would integrate themselves and their fab- ricated biographies into the mythological tex- ture of the ancient epics of superheroes. Ficti- tious genealogies, like the descent from Romulus and Remus, Hercules, Caesar, and Alexander the Great, were an integral part of early modern rul- er iconography and biography. Genealogy here was no longer bound to consanguinity, instead it developed into a cultural order, one that was not genetically but generically determined. Merit and fame brought about by virtuous accomplish- ment became the core ingredient for the male elite’s right to participate in fabricated lineages. The idea of distinct individual fame (a thought pattern rooted in ‘vertical’ ideologies of individ- uals surpassing each other in history) joins the concept of meritocratic genealogies (the horizon- tal idea of lineage) in galleries of famous men. These ‘synthetic’ rather than genetic lineages, be- fore the eighteenth century mainly instrumen- talized in political iconography, find their more modern and ‘enlightened’ counterparts in the galleries of scholars, artists and authors. They are hybrid attempts in evoking a homogeneity of the intellect, much of which is owed to the firm be- lief in the concept of the ‘genius’ so deeply root- ed in Western cultures. Scholarly memoria – Gelehrtenmemoria – has always had many faces: from author’s images in manuscripts and prints to the act of writing proper (if understood as an inscription into the collective memory of cultures); as well as from the portrait bust as part of intellectual galleries to The SaluTaTi Tomb in FieSole 151 8 See, among others, G. Lahusen: Zur Funktion und Rezeption des römischen Ahnenbildes, in: Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung (Römische Mitteilungen) 92, 1985, pp. 261–289; H. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture, New York 1996. 9 For an excellent and comprehensive overview of bust portraiture in eighteenth century England see M. Baker, The Marble Index. Roubiliac and Sculpted Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain, New Haven 2014, here for the representation of groups pp. 277–317. 10 T. Meisel, Gelehrte in Stein und Bronze. Die Denkmäler im Arkadenhof der Universität Wien, Vienna 2007. See also the activities of the group of art historians under I. Schemper-Sparholz at Vienna University and their research projects on the Vienna monuments. For a conference review of ‘Scholar’s Monuments: Historical Mean- ing and Cultural Significance’ see https://www.academia.edu/9738439/Review_Scholars_Monuments._Historical_ Meaning_and_Cultural_Significance (last accessed March 16, 2015).