This is an ivory version of a bronze medal by Giovanni Battista Pozzo (1670-1752), made in Rome in 1724. Conyers Middleton (1683-1750) was the first Chief Librarian of Cambridge University; on the reverse of this ivory medallion is a table with open books and bookshelves behind. Middleton commissioned the bronze medal when he was in Rome as a record of the eminence of Cambridge University and its library, having found that the Librarian of the Vatican assumed that Cambridge was only a school to prepare youths for Oxford. The subject was both a scholarly writer and a collector of antiquities, coins and gems. He was one of a circle of antiquarian visitors within the circle of Baron Philipp von Stosch (1691-1757), a resident of Rome, likewise a collector of gems, who had visited England in 1712, and who additionally acted as a spy for the British in Rome. Stosch may well have suggested Middleton should have his portrait carved in ivory by Pozzo.