Page - 209 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

of plasters above, when given around 1755 only a few of them were displayed in this interior in the eighteenth century. The majority of the marble portraits – though the guidebooks are generally silent on this point – were displayed, along with many painted portraits, elsewhere at Trinity (Fig. 12). Together with the painted portraits, the busts formed part of a larger scheme of commemora- tion that ran throughout the college’s principal spaces. A more specific programme, however, is discernible in the original arrangement of busts in the library, as this is described in late eight- eenth-century accounts. The 1763 edition of the Cantabrigia Depicta mentions the plaster busts on the top of the bookcases but more specifically adds a reference to the 4 beautiful Busts on marble Terms, two at each end, of the celebrated Ray, Wil- loughby, Bacon, and Newton. Set on their paired pedestals these four busts remain in their origin- al position (Fig. 13).21 The busts commissioned for the library were evidently conceived as a dis- tinctive group, reflecting the particular academ- ic interests of Smith and Walker as well as their shared commitment to the physical sciences (or ‘New Philosophy’) developed at Cambridge with the encouragement of Bentley and Barrow. By the 1750s, the research activity of New- ton’s time had ceased, allowing Heberden to comment more generally that the resident Fel- lows of the University were incrusted with the corroding rust of inactivity. But, while the earli- er experimental advances could not be matched, the mid-eighteenth century was significant as a period in which Newtonianism and natural phil- osophy became integrated into a reformed cur- riculum at Cambridge and the ‘holy alliance’ between Newtonian science and Anglican theol- ogy found institutional expression in the Whig university. Trinity was at the centre of these de- velopments and, in Gascoigne’s words, ‘formed Fig. 13: North end of the Wren Library with busts of Ray and Willoughby in situ. A very puissAnt spurre 209 21 The images of Bentley and Barrow might also have been introduced into the library during the eighteenth century.