Page - 203 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

ity College, Cambridge, where the Master, Rob- ert Smith, fashioned what was effectively a visual history of the college through portrait busts (Fig. 5 and 6). Here those represented were not just writers and scholars. Nor was the magnificent late seventeenth-century library, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the only space involved. Although Wren had envisaged the decora- tion of the library with sculpture, it occurred on- ly much later in the 1750s. In addition to 26 plas- ter busts of ancient and modern authors given around 1755, no less than 13 marble busts were commissioned for the college between 1751 and 1763, including ten executed by Louis-François Roubiliac, the leading sculptor working in mid- eighteenth-century Britain. Significantly, most of these images were historicising. This remark- able group of busts includes some examples of virtuoso carving as well as many images which draw on a variety of historical visual sources, but at the same time achieve effects of exceptional immediacy and animation. Their relationship to each other, as well as the evidence for their original settings, raises issues about the way in which traditional practices for displaying images of illustrious figures from the past were being re- worked for new ends. The earliest documentation for this commis- sion – or, more properly, this series of commis- sions – is found in a letter of 25 July 1753 from Mrs Elizabeth Montagu to her husband. Mrs Montagu writes about meeting Dr Smith with whom she fell into discourse upon some embellish- ments & ornaments to be added to the fine li- brary at Trinity College; there are to be 26 busto’s put up, 13 in memory of the Ancients, 13 of mod- erns. These are to be casts in plaister of Paris, but Mrs Middleton talks of a fine Marble Busto of Dr Middleton [the librarian of Cambridge Univer- Fig. 4: Interior of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. Engraving by François Erlinger, 1689. A very puissAnt spurre 203