Page - 212 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

commissioned images would have left the view- er in no doubt as to the importance being at- tached to the college’s past and its distinguished former members. But the unusual prominence of the sculptural portraits among this rich array must also have been striking. While sequences of busts were a familiar enough feature of many li- braries by this date, no institution was so richly adorned with marble images of its collective past. The Newton statue belongs to this continuum of sculptural portraiture, employed to articulate in a very telling way the authority and achieve- ment of the college’s members and to make vis- ible a powerful sense of the institution’s history and identity. Together with celebrating the col- lege’s past – and most notably the achievement of Newton – the prominent display, especially in the library, of figures associated with advan- ces in natural philosophy demonstrate an ideo- logical commitment to the new sciences, their role in the Cambridge curriculum and the pion- eering role that Trinity and its eighteenth-cen- tury Masters played in establishing this. At the same time, other sculptural portraits that were displayed throughout the college celebrated the college’s history by representing former mem- bers who were not necessarily scholars. In fact, this was a hybrid assemblage, albeit one in which scholarly achievements figured prominently. But what might we deduce from the ex- ample of Trinity College Cambridge, and the other cases I mentioned earlier, about the way in which writers and scholars were commemorated in academic institutions in the eighteenth cen- tury? We have seen here how assemblages or se- quences of busts celebrating writers and think- ers became more common during the eighteenth century and by mid-century were being seen as a necessary component of academic interiors – especially the library. Predominantly historicis- ing, the busts which populated such interiors sometimes represented pantheons of writers and thinkers, and were consciously considered to be exemplars, those who served as a puissant spurre. While at Trinity the combination of certain sub- jects could sometimes function as a visual regis- ter of an academic vision or agenda within the distinctive space of the library, the distribution of busts throughout the college intermingled with painted portraits shows that the arrange- ments were frequently more contingent and less programmatic. Furthermore, the assemblages of portrait busts need not be limited to schol- ars but could commemorate instead notable fig- ures in the college’s history or even benefactors. Although the eighteenth century saw a new and collective use of portrait busts within academ- ic institutions of Enlightenment Britain and in- deed Enlightenment Europe, it was only in the nineteenth century, most notably in the Ark- adenhof in Vienna, that writers, thinkers and scholars were fully and properly celebrated in sculptural form. Photographic acknowledgements: Fig. 1: owner; Figs. 2, 11, 13: author; Figs 3, 5, 6, 12: Trinity College, Cambridge; Figs. 7, 8, 14: Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Figs. 4, 10: V&A Images; Fig. 9: National Portrait Gallery, London. malcolm baker212 Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR