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Painted frieze of the Bodleian Library

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The painted frieze at the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, United Kingdom, is a series of 202 portrait heads in what is now the Upper Reading Room. It was made in 1619, and the choice of worthies to include was advanced for its time, featuring Copernicus and Paracelsus as well as Protestant reformers.[1] The portraits have been attributed to the London guild painter Thomas Knight; they were taken from at least ten different sources, according to current views.[2]

Head of Tycho Brahe from the Bodleian frieze.

The frieze was painted directly onto stonework (rather than by fresco technique), and its condition deteriorated despite restoration in the 18th century. It was plastered over in 1830, and rediscovered in 1949.[2]

Background

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What is now the Upper Reading Room, on the top storey of the Library, was referred to by contemporaries as the "gallery". It has been suggested therefore that the initial conception was similar to a long gallery.[3] Nowell Myres pointed out in one of his articles on the frieze that such instructive decoration by portraits in a library or museum was well known from the Giovio Series.[4] Precedents from England of the 16th century were portrait series of bishops of Chichester, and founders of Peterhouse, Cambridge.[5] Earlier precedents included portrait series of various groups such as, above all, saints, the Ancestors of Christ in a Tree of Jesse or other arrangement, or the Kings of France sculpted on the facade of Notre Dame. The Nine Worthies usually appeared in secular contexts. The Nine Worthies of London, proposed in 1592, cannot be said to have caught on. Later British examples include the Frieze of Parnassus (1864–72) at the base of the Albert Memorial in London, and the painted processional frieze of famous Scots in the entrance hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (1898).

Portrait collections in books (the book of icones) became one of the recognised genres of collecting and collation for Renaissance humanists, along with the emblem book and album amicorum.[6] The literary tradition of de viris illustribus found in this way its visual expression, typically known by the Italian term uomini illustri. The Bodleian heads, as in other places, served to join knowledge of the Christian and classical traditions.[7]

Content and layout

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Map of the Bodleian Library, 1919.

The frieze was painted in 1619. Its content came from Thomas Bodley (who had died in 1613) and the direction of his book collecting; but also represented the views of Thomas James, the first librarian. Theologically it portrays the Church of England as a continuation of the Catholic dissidents John Wyclif, Jan Hus, Savonarola, and Erasmus. The Protestant Reformation is strongly represented, and John Rainolds, the learned Oxford conforming Puritan, is included.[8]

The portrait heads are located high on the walls of the U-shaped floor, running above the windows, with paintings several feet apart spaced out by images mainly of books. There is a division by the topics on which the authors wrote, corresponding to the university disciplines of the time. The theological display is on the southern flank; the northern side's authors refer to the Faculty of Arts.[9]

List of the heads

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Thomas Hearne took detailed notes of the frieze in 1725. His list and copies of inscriptions were basic to the modern restoration; one head remains unidentified. Hearne listed 200 heads (the single woman being Sappho) where in fact there are 202.[2][10] As found in Hearne the heads are:

  1. Cyril of Alexandria
  2. Theodoret
  3. Athanasius
  4. Prosper of Aquitaine
  5. ?
  6. probably Pope Gregory I[11]
  7. Bede
  8. Isidore of Seville
  9. Alcuin
  10. Anselm
  11. Robert Grosseteste
  12. Rabanus Maurus
  13. John Damascenus
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. Peter Lombard
  16. Jean Gerson
  17. Konrad Pellecanus
  18. Tostatus
  19. Arias Montanus[12]
  20. Rhenanus
  21. Leo Jud
  22. Ulrich Hutenus
  23. Lambert Danaeus
  24. Heinrich Bullinger
  25. Martin Chemnitz
  26. George III, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau
  27. Martin Bucer
  28. Paul Fagius
  29. Andreas Hyperius
  30. Matthias Flacius Illyricus
  31. Rudolf Gualther
  32. Ludwig Lavater
  33. Wolfgang Musculus
  34. Augustin Marlorat
  35. Johannes Oecolampadius
  36. Huldrych Zwingli
  37. Thomas Holland
  38. Peter Martyr
  39. Philipp Melanchthon
  40. John Calvin
  41. Guilhem Farel
  42. Peter Viretus
  43. Theodore Beza
  44. Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde
  45. Hieronymus Zanchius
  46. Franciscus Junius the Elder
  47. John Rainolds
  48. Laurence Humphrey
  49. Desiderius Erasmus
  50. Martin Luther
  51. Andreas Vesalius
  52. Aulus Cornelius Celsus
  53. Andreas Mathiolus
  54. Girolamo Cardano
  55. Paracelsus
  56. Dioscorides
  57. Avicenna
  58. Galenus
  59. Hippocrates
  60. Aesclepius
  61. Justinian
  62. Andreas Tiraquellus
  63. Accursius
  64. Andreas Alciatus
  65. Guillaume Budé
  66. Jason Maynus (Giasone del Maino)
  67. Paulus de Castro
  68. Johannes de Imola
  69. Petrus de Ancharano
  70. Baldus de Ubaldis
  71. Aesop
  72. Hesiod
  73. Homer
  74. Berosus
  75. Sappho
  76. Linus
  77. Solon
  78. Euclid
  79. Theophrastus
  80. Socrates + omission by Hearne
  81. Pindar
  82. Virgil
  83. Simonides
  84. Ptolemy
  85. Plutarch
  86. Horace
  87. Marcus Terentius Varro
  88. Justinus
  89. Livy
  90. Boethius
  91. Pliny
  92. Seneca the Younger
  93. Zonaras
  94. Marcus Aurelius
  95. Strabo
  96. Alexander Aphrodiseus
  97. Porphyrius
  98. Johannes de Sacro Bosco
  99. Ludovico Ariosto
  100. Bartolomeo Platina
  101. Thucydides
  102. Sophocles
  103. Euripides
  104. Isocrates + Theocritus
  105. Aratus
  106. Sallust
  107. Terence
  108. taken as Alfonso V of Aragon the Magnanimous[13]
  109. Roger Bacon
  110. Philippe de Commines
  111. Albert Krantzius
  112. Johannes Aventinus
  113. Francesco Guicciardini
  114. Paulus Jovius
  115. Polydore Vergil
  116. Gerardus Mercator
  117. Abraham Ortelius
  118. Justus Lipsius
  119. Petrus Ramus
  120. Joseph Scaliger
  121. Sir Philip Sidney
  122. Julius Caesar Scaliger
  123. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
  124. Guillaume du Bartas
  125. Tycho Brahe
  126. Janus Douza
  127. Adolf van Meetkercke
  128. Juan Luis Vives
  129. Petrus Apianus
  130. Nicolas Copernicus
  131. Johannes Sleidanus
  132. Cornelius Agrippa
  133. Poliziano
  134. Lorenzo Valla
  135. Libanius
  136. Sabellicus
  137. Johannes Regiomontanus
  138. Martial
  139. Lucan
  140. Persius
  141. Juvenal
  142. Ovid
  143. Geoffrey Chaucer
  144. Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini
  145. Petrarch
  146. Dante
  147. Leonardo Aretino
  148. Giovanni Boccaccio
  149. Cicero
  150. Archimedes
  151. Aristotle
  152. Plato
  153. Pythagoras
  154. Diogenes
  155. Aeschines
  156. Herodotus
  157. Aristophanes
  158. Bartolus Saxoferratus
  159. Azo of Bologna
  160. John Case
  161. Johannes Heurnius
  162. John Bale
  163. John Foxe
  164. Robert Abbot
  165. Thomas Bilson
  166. John Jewel
  167. John Whitgift
  168. Alexander Nowell
  169. Thomas Cranmer
  170. Herbert Westphaling
  171. Richard Eedes
  172. Thomas Sparkes
  173. John Spenser
  174. Savonarola
  175. Jerome of Prague
  176. Jan Hus
  177. John Wyclif
  178. Pierre d'Ailly
  179. Nicholas of Lyra
  180. Duns Scotus
  181. Bernard of Clairvaux
  182. John Chrysostom
  183. Augustine of Hippo
  184. Rufinus
  185. Jerome
  186. Gregory of Nazianzus
  187. Ambrose of Milan
  188. Ephrem the Syrian
  189. Epiphanius
  190. Basil of Caesarea
  191. Hilary of Poitiers
  192. Eusebius
  193. Dionysius of Alexandria
  194. Cyprian
  195. Origen
  196. Tertullian
  197. Clement of Alexandria
  198. Justin Martyr
  199. Philo
  200. Dionysius the Areopagite

Sources for the heads

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The collection was eclectic in terms of its models, but four major sources in books for the iconography of the heads have been identified. Other books were involved, according to current scholarship, and accessible English portraits in some cases.[2]

The Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris 1584) of André Thévet was used for many of the Church Fathers and medieval theologians, and some of the classical authors. The Icones virorum illustrium series of volumes of 50 (Frankfurt, from 1598) of Jean-Jacques Boissard and Theodore de Bry supplied many models for the heads of humanists. The strongly Protestant collection of Jacobus Verheiden (The Hague 1602) was a source for many of the reformers, where the engraver was Hendrik Hondius I. Other classical authors and humanists were taken from the Opus chronographicum of Pieter van Opmeer (Antwerp 1611):[2] its posthumous edition contained woodcut illustrations in the style of portrait medals.[14]

The restorers of the 1950s used some other sources from the period, including Theodore Beza's Icones (Geneva 1580), and Enrico Bacco's Effigie di tutti i re che han dominato il reame di Naoli (Naples 1602) for the head of Alphonso of Aragon.[2] The original source for the head of St. Ephrem is not known;[15] as for other heads of Church Fathers, the restorers used the 1624 work of Raphael Custos, Patrologia, id est Descriptio S. Patrum Graecorum & Latinorum, qui in Augustana Bibliotheca visuntur.[2]

Notes

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  1. ^ Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1980), pp. 24–5.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g M. R. A. Bullard, Talking Heads: The Bodleian Frieze, its Inspiration, Sources, Designer and Significance, Bodleian Library Record, xix/6 (April 1994), pp. 461-500
  3. ^ Nicholas Tyacke, Seventeenth-century Oxford (1997), p. 152; Google Books.
  4. ^ E. Hulshoff Pol, The First Century of Leiden University Library (1975), p. 416; Google Books.
  5. ^ Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540-1640 (2012), p. 35; Google Books.
  6. ^ Alciato's Emblems and the Album Amicorum
  7. ^ (in German) Mark Hengerer (editor), Macht und Memoria: Begräbniskultur europäischer Oberschichten in der Frühen Neuzeit (2005), p. 75; Google Books.
  8. ^ Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: the Erasmian legacy and religious change in early modern England (2009), p. 156; Google Books.
  9. ^ Centre for Early Modern Studies.
  10. ^ Thomas Hearne, A letter, containing an account of some antiquities between Windsor and Oxford: with a list of the several pictures in the school-gallery adjoyning to the Bodlejan library. Written an. Dom. MDCCVIII. (1725), p. 36; Google Books.
  11. ^ Identification by Nowell Myres; Bullard note p. 489.
  12. ^ There was some confusion with this head and the next of Rhenanus, with incorrect inscriptions; it is possible that muddle affected the series from Pellecanus to Hutenus. Bullard note p. 489.
  13. ^ By the restorers, see Bullard's reference to Bacco; Alfonso King of Aragon but as Alfonso V contradicts Hearne's date.
  14. ^ Albert Clément, From Ciconia to Sweelinck: donum natalicium Willem Elders (1994), p. 91 note 1; Google Books.
  15. ^ Abba: the tradition of Orthodoxy in the West: festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (2003), p. 71; Google Books.
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