Page - 200 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

ly made use of a heightened illusionism. These veristic, illusionistic effects emphasised the im- age’s immediacy, suggesting the fleeting and mo- mentary. The momentary effect was of course at odds with sculpture’s association with perma- nence. This seeming contradiction was articu- lated in the way such images were apprehended by the attentive viewer, who was at one and the same time taken in by the animation and im- mediacy of the illusionistic effects of carving, while being made aware of the marble bust’s na- ture as a made artifact through its insistent ma- teriality, not least through the obvious marks of the chisel. In the more successful examples, the balance between illusionism and materiality was such that part of the pleasure of looking at a marble bust involved a conscious play with the very process of perception. Yet a further twist to the way such images work occurs when, as with so many of these images, the subject repre- sented is an historical figure. Here an historicis- ing image is invested with the effects of immedi- acy and animation. These were some of the factors involved in the making and viewing of portrait busts in the eighteenth century and, in particular, with those series or sequences of busts representing writers or scholars, most of them long dead. The view- ing of such images was complicated and enriched when different examples were juxtaposed and dis- played to form a series within an academic in- stitution with which the subjects had belonged. How did they work within such a setting and in what sort of interior were they to be seen togeth- er? The celebration of great men through sculp- tural images did not, of course, have to be an in- stitutional matter and did not necessarily require an institutional setting. One early eighteenth- century grouping of portrait busts consisted of those images of natural philosophers Newton and Locke, assembled by Queen Caroline for her Hermitage at Richmond. Just a few years later, two of these figures were included among the writers and thinkers who constituted one half of the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. Here, these exemplars of the vita contemplativa, accom- panied by Milton, Shakespeare and Pope among others, were balanced by a series of monarchs who represented the vita activa as well as, collect- Fig. 2: William Kent (with busts by Michael Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers), The Temple of British Worthies, ca. 1735, stone. Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. malcolm baker200 Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR