Page - 232 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

from head and shoulders to full length. The college has got a bit richer, can afford a bit more.24 Figure 4 shows the Darwin portrait in situ (Fig. 4). This room in Darwin College is used for meetings, conferences and symposia. It is not usually open to the public, students or even the Fellowship – it is not a room that people may use on an informal basis. This room contains all the portraits of the Masters and as such, the room acts as a kind of repository or archive for the College’s symbolic capital. Certain Fellows have asked that these portraits be moved to the din- ing hall, because they remember the Masters and want to be able to tell their stories about those Masters during dinners and to use the portrait as part of their storytelling performances. The Bursar told me that he personally opposed this, as he was primarily concerned with maintaining the portraits’ good condition. When the Master retires, his or her portrait accedes to an aurat- ic memorial object, and from the Bursar’s point of view, cannot therefore be used informally by storytellers engaged in oral transmission of Dar- win’s heritage to students – in other words, in the process of transferring communicative (un- stable, disorganised, non-specialised) memory to the collective.25 These are portraits which need to exist, but do not need to be seen as part of every- day collective College practice. The portraits are characterised by their distance from the every- day, they are cultural formations of fixed mem- ory points. Their subjects become ‘figures of Fig. 4: Committee room in Darwin College, Cambridge. sara ayres232 24 Interview with Peter Brindle. Again, wealth was a pre-condition for the production of this type of portrait; this excerpt also highlights the payment structures entailed in portrait commissioning, which depend not just on the reputation of the painter, but on the size of the portrait, the amount of the subject’s body which is included, the complexity of the background and the number of objects included. 25 W. Kansteiner, Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies, in: His- tory and Theory, 41:2, 2002, pp. 179–197, (p. 182). Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR