The College’s recent public appeal for help locating three of the original statues that once stood atop the Chapel Tower has had gratifyingly wide pick-up in the media, with articles in the Telegraph, i, Oxford Mail and BBC website, among others. There have been no confirmed sightings to date, although rumours persist that all or part of one statue might be hidden away somewhere at Magdalen.

The statues are female figures, each around 2.75 metres in height, and represent the disciplines of Astronomy, Medicine, Geometry and Theology. The originals were installed when the Chapel was built in the early 1690s. They were then replaced in the 1820s, with the original version of Medicine finding a home in the President’s Garden. The 19th-century versions were then removed, restored and reinstalled in 1960, with Medicine restored to the tower as it was in better nick than its replacement.

The passage of time means that the current statues once again need replacing, funding permitting, both for safety reasons and because erosion has made their features increasingly indistinct. Distinguished local stonemason Alex Wenham will undertake the job, and he recently visited College with a polystyrene template for Medicine so that we could see what the 21st-century version would look like close up.

When the work is done, the question will arise again of what to do with the statues that come down and what their afterlife may be. Medicine is not the only statue to have found a home in the President’s Garden (temporarily, in that case). As attendees of the recent Trinity Players production or Sunday’s Jazz Mass may have noticed, there is a niche in the north-west corner of the garden with a very worn carved figure in it.

This is (or was) a statue of the Archangel Michael fighting Satan in the form of a dragon. As our Honorary Fellow Martin Kemp established some years ago, the Archangel was probably carved in the 1520s for New College, thus predating Trinity by a few decades. In 1839, New College engaged a stonemason called Mr Grimsley to restore or replace some of their exterior stonework, rather as we chose to do with the tower statues, and shortly afterwards the Warden wrote to my predecessor James Ingram:

“My dear President,

Grimsley will hand over to you St Michael if you ask him for it. You will find it sadly the worse for wind and weather.

Believe me, very truly yours,

N. Shuttleworth.”

Quite why President Ingram was so keen to provide a home for the eroded Archangel is not known. But he drafted an inscription to accompany the new arrival:

“Hortorum esto fidelis custos O Michaelis:

Angelus atque Deus sic eris usque meus.

(Be a faithful guardian of the gardens, O Michael:

Thus you will forever be my angel and God.)”

Back in 2008, Martin wrote in the Trinity newsletter that: “Unfortunately, the battered saint should not remain where he is for much longer. The surface of the stone is very abraded and very vulnerable to further weathering.” And yet, more than 15 years later, there he remains: a pale shadow of his replacement, whom you can see on the east gable of New College Chapel just after you enter the college from Holywell Street.

Where the current tower statues should come to rest is an interesting question. One’s first instinct is to preserve them in the College where they can be seen, but they are copies rather than originals, and they are so eroded that their meaning and significance will not easily be apparent to the passer-by. And, as the Archangel demonstrates, they will inevitably deteriorate further. We will need to ponder further.