Head Space

Waiting in the atrium of the Weston Library in Oxford for my god-daughter to arrive for tea a couple of weeks ago, I caught part of a lecture about two ginormous stone heads sitting on plinths in the middle of the floor. They are there for an exhibition examining both them and their colleagues which top the pillars of the Sheldonian Theatre on the opposite side of Broad Street. I had no idea that the current ones aren't original, dating to the time of Sir Christopher Wren who built the Sheldonian where centuries of students have been matriculated or received their degrees. Not only are they replacements, but they are replacements of replacements. The one you can see on the left in this photograph comes from the 17th-century originals, removed in 1868 after two centuries of weathering, and now normally resident in the garden of the Provost of Worcester College. The right-hand one is from the 1868 set, yet looks in far worse condition because the University had them done rather cheaply in soft limestone, so they only lasted until the 1970s which was when the current heads were installed. At least that's what the lecturer said; this account avers that they were daubed with paint by enthusiastic undergraduates and scrubbed so fiercely that their stone fabric was damaged virtually before they got going. Another has found its way to the Fellows' Garden at Wadham College while a third has been at Horspath Manor since 2011. 

But what are the heads? By the 1860s they were being referred to as 'philosophers'. It appears to be Max Beerbohm in 1911's Zuleika Dobson who first dubs them 'emperors' which is what I knew them as when I was at Balliol in the late 1980s; but oxfordhistory.org.uk includes a photo from what seems to be a guidebook from around that time - and no later to judge by the typeface - that already refers to a joke that the heads are 'the Twelve Caesars with an extra one that pushed himself in and is laughing at the idea'. My god-daughter Karolyn was under the impression that they are philosophers, too, but also believed they dated back to the Middle Ages 'because they're so grotesque' - being a Classicist rather than a Medievalist. In fact they probably aren't anything, as 17th-century accounts call them merely termains, terminal sculptures. 

But they are in some way the lugubrious spirits of this darkling city. Not for nothing do they loom so large in Zuleika Dobson; Beerbohm writes, 

Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to wind and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles ...

(Making the grinning thirteenth Judas, perhaps?)