In the chills of the late 19th century, sitting on top of the University of Sydney’s Great Hall sat a servant of God – an Angel of Knowledge.
Standing two metres tall, the Angel was installed when the building was constructed to famous Victorian architect Thomas Blacket’s late Tudor Gothic design. It formed a collection of thirteen angels together with twelve wooden effigies adorning the Great Hall’s hammerbeam roof: the Arts and Sciences, Dialectic, Ethics, Grammar, Music, Metaphysics, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Physics.
The Arts’ motto was an extract from the Old Testament: Timor Domini Principium Sapientiae or ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10). Meanwhile, the Sciences led with the New Testament’s Scientia inflat, Charitas aedificat or ‘Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up’ (Corinthians 8:1).
“The gable at the eastern end of the hall is surmounted by a fine statue seven feet high [2.1 meters] – that of an angel, beautifully designed and cut in stone, representing Christian philosophy, standing in an attitude of benediction,” the Sydney Morning Herald opined in 1859.
“This figure rests on a well carved pedestal, the base of which terminates in a nondescript monster, or gargoyle, stretching over a small ventilating orifice of an ornamental and appropriate character.”
The reason as to why the University took the divine messenger away from her pedestal?
It was feared that the edifice might, one day, collapse unceremoniously and injure (or worse, kill) an unsuspecting passerby. That, and opinion that the angel was, for lack of a better word, unsightly compared to the rest of the Quad. Following a renovation of the Hall in 1874, the Angel was removed alongside the wooden floors that used to grace the room.
“The stone statue of the Angel of Knowledge has been very judiciously deposed from its windy perch at the eastern gable, where its weight, position, and very insufficient fastenings have long endangered the whole eastern front,” said the Herald in July 1874.
The masthead went on to give an unsympathetic assessment of the statue, viewing it as an eyesore rather than an asset.
“The most enthusiastic anti-iconoclast can scarcely regret its disappearance, for the top-heavy winged object was really an anomalous disfigurement to the edifice.”
According to USyd Professor of Geology and Mineralogy Archibald Liversidge’s records in the University Archives, the last time that the head of the Angel was found in person was in the University chemical laboratories for approximately two to three years.
“The head was kept in the Chemical Laboratory for a time perhaps three years,” Liversidge wrote on a photograph he took of the Quadrangle.
Whatever became of the statue ever since remains a mystery. Perhaps, like all stones, destined to weather and fade away through the passage of time, the Angel of Knowledge has been reduced to sparkling mica, tiny grains of quartz and returned to mother nature.
Alternatively, the Angel lies dormant somewhere, collecting dust bunnies, quietly waiting to emerge again from the graveyard of time.