Patrick Comerford
When I was in Oxford a few days ago, checking out the peculiar Greek inscription above the Wren Door in the Divinity School, I found myself looking once again looking at the ‘Emperor Heads’ at the Sheldonian Theatre and trying, fruitlessly, to figure out which emperors or philosophers they are supposed to depict or represent, and that are certainly more impressive than any Hallowe’en masks you may see this evening.
These heads are imposing figures at the east end of Broad Street, where the cluster of and they are one of the imposing or eye-catching features at a cluster of buildings in the heart of the city that includes the Sheldonian Theatre (1669), the Old Ashmolean Building (1683), now the History of Science Museum, the Clarendon Building (1715), originally home to Oxford University Press, and the Weston Library, redeveloped in 2015.
The so-called ‘Emperor Heads’ are 17 large stone herm busts or sculpted heads and as a collection they form one of Oxford’s most peculiar historic attractions. Each head shows a different type of beard, and they gaze down on tourists and students alike from the top of pillars that are part of the wall and fence surrounding the Sheldonian Theatre and the adjacent Museum of the History of Science or Old Ashmolean.
For 360 years or so, these characterful heads have featured in poetry, literature and art, and they remain one of the most photographed and well-recognised cultural landmarks in the city. The busts are more precisely called ‘herms’, as they depict the head and shoulders of each man.
Despite being known popularly as the ‘Emperors’, they do not represent any emperors, nor, indeed, anyone in particular. It has been suggest they represent bearded philosophers or sages, and they are bedecked with ivy wreaths, symbolising wisdom, rather than imperial laurel wreaths. It has even been suggested they were designed to compose a history of beards.
The Sheldonian Theatre was designed by Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) and was built between 1664 and 1669. The building is named after the project’s principal financial backer, Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), twice Warden of All Souls College (1636-1648, 1660-1661), Bishop of London (1660-1663), Chancellor of Oxford University (1667-1669) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1663-1677).
Wren was educated at Wadham College, had been a Fellow of All Souls College (1653-1657) – Monday is All Souls’ Day – and he was based in Oxford from 1661 to 1668 when he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy. His design of the Sheldonian was based on Serlio’s 16th century engraving of the Theatre of Marcellus built in Rome in the first century BCE.
When Wren completed Sheldonian Theatre in 1669, he commissioned 14 bearded stone busts to be placed around the perimeter. He asked the sculptor William Byrd ( (1624-1691) to create 13 busts for the northern boundary, where the theatre jutted out into Broad Street. Though at first glance they appear similar, each bust is unique, and each ‘emperor’ has a completely different expression and a different type of beard.
Wren is said to have asked Byrd to carve each bust with a wide-eyed expression of shock as a not-too-subtle dig at his patron, Gilbert Sheldon, whose penny-pinching budget made Wren’s task in designing the theatre very difficult. Byrd carved the busts from Clipsham stone, an oolite limestone quarried near the village of Clipsham in Rutland. The stone is coarsely grained and hard-wearing, and remains a popular stone for building and sculpture to this day.
When the Old Ashmolean building, now the Museum of the History of Science, was built beside the Sheldonian Theatre in 1679-1683, four more heads were added to the building frontage, bringing the total number of busts to 17. In time, one was removed around 1713 to make way for the Clarendon Building.
But the heads we see today are not the original ones – nor are they even the original replacements. The heads in place today are, in fact, the third generation of bearded heads to sit there.
The first, original figures were carved in local Taynton limestone and they lasted for almost 200 years before Victorian replacements were put in their place in 1869.
The second set of heads was made from softer Milton limestone, and suffered miserably as a result. The heads soon became blackened by soot and disfigured by acid rain, worsened by the coal fires that burned in students’ college rooms. As Oxford’s air filled with thick smoke, its buildings and the heads were becoming more dirty and were decaying.
These 17 busts of men became known as the Emperor Heads, the Oxford Emperors, the philosophers, or, sometimes the Twelve Apostles. The first reference to them as ‘Emperor Heads’ is found in 1911 in the novel Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm.
But this second generation did not use the same hard-wearing stone as the first set. They were so badly weathered only 57 years after their installation that when the poet John Betjeman came up to Oxford in 1925, he saw them as ‘the mouldering busts round the Sheldonian’ and ‘unknown bearded guards’. In his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960), Betjeman compared them to ‘illustrations of skin diseases in a medical textbook’.
The Victorian busts also became a focal point for undergraduate pranks so that they were often painted, given lipstick smiles and had traffic cones placed on their heads like hats. They were worn away by the combination of weathering, the polluted air of Victorian Oxford, harsh cleaning and vandalism, and were left in a poor state of repair.
With the help of the Historic Buildings Fund, a widespread effort was made to clean-up, repair and replace the stone fabric of Oxford. After fruitless conservation attempts of three heads of the second generation, Michael Black, a local sculptor, was commissioned to make the new set that still stand today. The heads now looking down on on Broad Street are the third set of Emperor Heads.
But, despite their historical and cultural value, the first two sets of heads were never fully recorded and the whereabouts of many of them remains largely unknown. Black tracked down seven of the original heads, five scattered around Oxford as garden ornaments and two in a house in Herefordshire. One original head is in the Fellows Garden at Wadham College, which Wren had attended.
From 1970 to 1972, Black and his two assistants carved 13 new heads for the Sheldonian from Lincolnshire Clipsham stone. They later carved four more heads for the Museum of the History of Science. Each head took a minimum of 30 hours to complete.
Black modelled his heads on the originals by Wren and Byrd, including their shocked expressions, and also drew on 17th century engravings by David Loggan as templates to make the heads relatively true to the originals. Black made each beard different and added amusing touches, such as the small figure of a bird in the hair of one head, an allusion to the fact that the originals were designed by a man named Wren and carved by a man called Byrd.
A recent project investigated the heads from the perspective of heritage science, seeking to unravel their history and mysteries and looking at any implications they may have for the sustainable management of built heritage, collective memory and identity. An exhibition on the heads at the Weston Library in 2019 was the culmination of over five years of research by the School of Geography and the Environment team. The display reconstructed the history of the heads and first, second, and third generation heads came face-to-face for the first time.
The 17 carved heads at the Sheldonian Theatre and the Old Ashmolean are now the third generation of Emperor Heads. As a collection, they have become an iconic feature of Oxford, almost like a 360-year record of urban architectural decay, conservation, environmental change and changing attitudes and perceptions.
The Clarendon Building beside the Sheldonian Theatre was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and built in 1711-1715 to house the Oxford University Press. It was known as the Printing House or the Clarendon Printing House until the University Press moved to Walton Street in 1832.
Lead figures of the nine Muses were placed on top of the building in 1717 and a lead statue of Lord Clarendon was placed in a clamshell niche on the first floor of the south side in 1721 and moved to the west side of the building in 1947.
All ten statues at the Clarendon Building are undergoing extensive renovation, with Lord Clarendon and four of the original muses temporarily removed and the two fibreglass ones being replaced. They will all be painted in the stone colour they would have had originally. Part of the Clarendon Building is now covered in cladding and scaffolding, but I hope to see the renovated statues in time and to blog about them then.
