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a catalyst for the cultivation of scientific activity within the university as a whole’.22 Smith’s choice of subjects for the library needs to be interpreted in relation to these con- cerns. In one sense, the prominence given to the images of Newton and Bacon may be seen as an attempt to make the most of the college’s illustri- ous scientific past at a period when new research in the experimental sciences, like undergraduate numbers, were at a low ebb, just as the inclusion of Ray and Willoughby might be associated with the not wholly successful attempts made by Ri- chard Walker (who might indeed have suggested the commissioning of the busts) to re-establish botanical studies through his foundation of the University’s Botanical Garden. But Smith’s addi- tions to the imagery of library and the chapel are better understood as the visual equivalent to his popularising of experimental science through the publication of accessible textbooks. The place of science within the Cambridge curriculum was being consolidated not only through the publi- cation of these works but also through the pres- ence of scientists’ images in the library where they were read. Quite apart from this particular grouping of images, the commissioning and use of the busts is interesting in that most of the sitters repre- sented in this form already had a presence in the college as painted portraits. What then, we may ask, was to be gained by commissioning im- ages of the same figures as more expensive mar- ble busts? These commissions must presumably have been undertaken on the assumption that a representation in sculptural form added some- thing or worked in a different way. Of course, given that at least some of these busts were from the start intended for display in the library, such images might be seen in terms of their tradition- al role as appropriate ornaments for a library, as recommended by Naudé. Without doubt, Smith and Walker would have been well aware of earli- er examples of libraries adorned with busts of an- cient and modern authors, not to mention cases where family members contributed busts of fig- ures from an institution’s past history, as at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. However, since the busts produced as part of Smith’s ambitious plans were intended for dis- play not just in the library but throughout the college, the significance of commissioning sculp- tural images should perhaps be understood not simply in terms of a tradition of library busts. Instead, the busts at Trinity seem to have been commissioned and executed on the assumption that the sculptural portrait was not simply an al- ternative or supplement to a painted image but carried with it a different cluster of associations, and a perhaps heavier weight of meaning. Such images, after all, were intended to celebrate the Fig. 14: Louis-François Roubiliac, Sir Isaac Newton, 1755, marble, Trinity College, Cambridge. malcolm baker210 22 J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution, Cambridge 1988, p. 78. Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR