Godfrey Kneller’s Portrait of Matthew Prior: a Mystery Solved

Until the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of museums and art galleries, the exhibition British Baroque: Power and Illusion was showing at Tate Britain in London. Trinity College lent two of the carvings by Grinling Gibbons from the Wren Library to this exhibition. You can read more about all the Wren carvings in an earlier …

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Trinity College has lent two manuscripts to a fabulous new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World looks at the imaginative world of the medieval bestiary. A bestiary is a compendium of animals - mythical and real – which usually highlights the religious …

Robinson Crusoe

The novel by Daniel Defoe commonly known as Robinson Crusoe was first published 300 years ago, on 25th April 1719. Robinson Crusoe is the only survivor of a shipwreck who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island before he is finally rescued.  He has only what he can salvage from the wreckage: tools, weapons, …

Nobel Prizes at Trinity College

On 3 October 2018 it was announced that Sir Gregory Winter, Master of Trinity College, has been jointly awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Professors Frances Arnold and George Smith, for his pioneering work in using phage display for the directed evolution of antibodies, with the aim of producing new pharmaceuticals. The Nobel …

Uncompromising women: the fight for the vote

2018 marks the centenary of the Representation of the People Act; a law which gave the vote to certain women in Britain, as long as they were over 30 and met a property qualification. Ten years later, women achieved the same voting rights as men. We are also celebrating the 40 year anniversary of female …

A Botanical Watercolourist at Trinity: Clarence Bicknell

Trinity College has seen many notable botanists pass through its doors, perhaps most famously John Ray and Francis Willughby, whose magnificent busts by Roubiliac adorn the entrance to the Wren Library. A small exhibition running until 4 July 2018 celebrates the botanical paintings of Clarence Bicknell, a student at Trinity in the 1860s who spent …

Wifredo Lam : Livres d’artiste [2]

In an earlier post we looked at Wifredo Lam’s collaboration with Antonin Artaud and Aimé Césaire. Here we consider his work in producing books with the writers Ghérasim Luca, René Char and Jean-Dominique Rey. Apostroph’Apocalypse Wifredo Lam’s grandest and most complex book is the remarkable Apostroph’Apocalypse, a collaboration with the poet Ghérasim Luca (1913–94). In …

Wifredo Lam : Livres d’artiste [1]

  The Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam (1902–82) was a pioneer in incorporating non-Western ideas into his creations. A special exhibition is on display in the Wren Library until 14 June 2018, which celebrates Lam’s collaborations with several of the leading French-language poets of the twentieth century to produce livres d’artiste. Of mixed African, Spanish and Chinese …

31 October 1517: The Birth of Luther’s Reformation

31 October 2017 marks exactly 500 years since Martin Luther sent a list of 95 Theses against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz. Tradition records that the Theses were also nailed to the West Door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. The publication initiated a heated discussion which rapidly spread throughout Europe …

Italian Illuminated Incunabula

The Wren Library has always been famous for its outstanding collection of illuminated manuscripts. Less well known are the illuminations added by hand to many of its earliest printed books. A new catalogue of illuminations in Italian printed books of the fifteenth century in the Cambridge College libraries and the Fitzwilliam Museum has brought to …