In 1834, a mausoleum was designed that defied – still defies – any hope of anyone’s being able adequately to describe its glory.
It honoured Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), the great scientist, physicist, alchemist, mathematician, theologian, author and astronomer. He’d died over 100 years earlier and been buried in Westminster Abbey. It was suggested that he might also be posthumously remembered at his home in St Martin’s Street, Westminster, but with a most startlingly remarkable monument.
It could not have been any stranger: a 40-foot-high stepped stone pyramid, sliced off two thirds of the way up with a colossal stone globe and, if you please, it was to encase Newton’s whole house.
The neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée drew designs for it for our interest and pleasure. It was to be created 50 years after Newton's death, when he had become a most potent symbol of the Enlightenment. Prepare yourselves for this wonder: a vast sphere, 500 feet high, stipulated to be taller than the great Pyramids of Giza and encompassed by two large barriers circled by many hundreds of cypress trees.
Its design was intended to reflect the day and the night. The night effect appears when the sarcophagus is illuminated by the sunlight shining through the holes, occurring when the sunlight pours through the massive and spheric shape of the building.
Born a tiny baby who could fit into a two-quart jug, Newton was to die a king of men. Godlike with his discoveries, he formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that became the dominant scientific viewpoint and continued being so for centuries.
He built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed the theory of colour. He lectured on optics and investigated the refraction of light.
He showed that the multicoloured light produced by a prism – which he called a spectrum – could be recomposed into a white light by a lens and a second prism. In 1704, he published Opticks, in which he plunged into his corpuscular theory of light.
He had been developing the theory of gravitation from as early as – if you please – 1665. He was then to apply himself to celestial mechanics by studying gravitation and its effect on the orbits of the planets. And so he thundered on.
His great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was to give him international fame.
Then, of course, there was the famous story of the apple falling out of a tree allowing him to untangle the laws of gravity.
A highly decorated monument honoured him in Westminster Abbey, inscribed with the words (in Latin):
‘Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced.
‘Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race!’
The poet Alexander Pope had written an epitaph for Newton, but lamentably this was not allowed to be put on the monument in the Abbey. It read, ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.’
The monument stands in the nave against the choir screen, to the north of the entrance to the choir, and was executed by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770) to the designs of the architect William Kent (1685-1748); it was finished in August 1730.
It is made of white and grey marble. Atop its base, which sports an inscription in Latin, is a sarcophagus with large scroll feet and a relief panel; this portrays boys using instruments associated with Newton’s mathematical and optical work -– a telescope, a prism and a steel yard. Other figures reflect his activities as Master of the Mint: they carry pots full of coins while a metal ingot is fed into a furnace.
Above the sarcophagus lies Newton, draped in a toga, reclining against a small pile of books representing his great works. These are labelled ‘Divinity’, ‘Chronology’ and ‘Philo Prin Math’ [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica].
Behind his left hand stand two winged boys, holding a scroll showing a mathematical design. The image on this scroll, somehow obliterated in the early- 19th century, was repainted in 1977 from particulars in Newton’s manuscripts.
The monument’s background is a pyramid, which bears a celestial globe depicting the signs of the zodiac, the constellations and the path of the comet of 1680. On top of the globe sits Urania (the muse of astronomy) leaning on a book.
Newton was a humble fellow. He wrote, ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
And ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’
There are two more footnotes well worth relating. The last £1 note ever produced was designed with an elegant representation of Newton.
And there is the renowned story of the great man’s dog – I fear a Pomeranian – which, by knocking over a candle, burnt most of his papers. ‘Oh Diamond, Diamond,’ Newton lamented. ‘Thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done.’
In December 1960, the papers’ remains were sold for £380,000.
The Oldie July 2024
