– my lady – or m’onna Lisa, the wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo? Perhaps, but also – in certain ways – it is surely more. The time and care indulged means that, among other things, the Mona Lisa is a self portrait of the painter’s soul. His soul, with a bridge nearby. As well as being a painter, Leonardo was an inventor of technically advanced machines, an architect and a military engineer. Without doubt he knew much about bridges and almost certainly loved them for their structural logic and power. He probably also saw them as emblems of human achievement, as Humanist creations that reveal the dignity, value, ingenuity and intrinsic worth of man. Even without reference to God, man was confirmed in his high status by such acts of genius and endeavour as bridge construction.
Bridges appear in the paintings of Botticelli, Raphael and, in particular, in the work of Canaletto. He paints not just bridges in Venice but also, in the mid 1740s, in London. The wonder-bridge at the time was Westminster Bridge – the first major bridge over the Thames built since London Bridge was completed in the very early thirteenth century (see page 16). The new bridge had inspired London-based artists from the moment construction started in 1739 on the designs of the Swiss engineer, Charles Labelye. Richard Wilson had, in 1744, painted its arches rising from the water. When Canaletto painted the bridge in 1746, he placed it in an almost Venetian context – showing the river packed with boats and large ornamental barges – and also produced a remarkable view of London framed by one of the arches of the bridge, complete with timber centering still in place.
This playful and inventive work by Canaletto seems to have challenged – and inspired – the London-based artist Samuel Scott who around 1750, when the bridge was nearing completion, produced an almost obsessive series of paintings. He portrayed the bridge in its setting and, more remarkably, produced over half a dozen studies showing details of, and views through, a couple of arches. Scott was evidently determined to out-do Canaletto at his own game, for not only did he emulate Canaletto’s unusual arch-framed view of the city but also embellished his images of the bridge with the trappings of daily life. Scott placed bustling or pondering people on the bridge and showed construction details – it was to be an emblem of urban vitality, of change, of London, and a vehicle for grasping new and unexpected views of the city.
In fact this was another favoured symbolic role for the bridge – an elevated and disinterested platform from which to see the world in revealing perspective, as if an Olympian god were looking down on the world of mortals. In September 1802 this was precisely the lofty position that inspired William Wordsworth – who was in fact given extra elevation by being perched on top of a stagecoach – when he wrote Upon Westminster Bridge. Apart from the reference in the title, the poem doesn’t mention Westminster Bridge directly but it is obvious that without the bridge – without the experience of passing over water atop a slowly moving vehicle on a still, late summer morning – nothing would have been possible, no insights or pleasures gained. Moved by the view of the metropolis offered by this relatively new vantage point, Wordsworth had a sudden vision of urban beauty and, in homage, created a hymn to London: ‘Earth has not any thing to show more fair…The City now doth, like a garment, wear/ The beauty of the morning: silent bare…Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!/ The river glideth at his own sweet will:/ Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;/ And all that mighty heart is lying still!’3
One of a series of paintings by Samuel Scott showing Westminster Bridge under construction in around 1750.
As artistically ecstatic are the paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Paris’s oldest surviving bridge – the Pont Neuf completed in 1609 – and the life it engendered over the reflective river inspired Renoir in the early 1870s to help forge the fleeting light effects and immediacy of Impressionism. A few years later Monet became entranced by the little Chinese-style timber bridge he had created in the early 1880s within his garden at Giverny, France, and painted it in different lights to create a series of studies that in a sense define his art.
For both these artists bridges were clearly admirable things, just as they were a few years later for Surrealist and Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. In 1917, when defending his decision to display a urinal as a work of art in a New York gallery, Duchamp explained that by placing the urinal at an unusual angle, in the novel context of an art gallery, and naming it ‘Fountain’, its familiar ‘significance disappeared under a new title and point of view’. Duchamp claimed to have transformed the essence of the object in an almost alchemical manner by creating ‘a new thought’ for it in the eyes of the viewer. He’d opened, in the prophetic words of William Blake, new ‘doors of perception’.4 And to those who argued that to display such a piece of off-the-peg plumbing as a urinal was just plain vulgar and could not possibly be art, Duchamp simply replied: ‘that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’.5
It is not just poets and painters who have viewed bridges as potent symbols and metaphors. So have novelists. For example Thornton Wilder, in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, published in 1927, uses the sudden collapse of an ancient, creeper-built suspension bridge in Peru in which five people are killed, to explore the nature of God and religion. The fate of the bridge becomes a metaphor for the fate of man, a symbol of divine will. Were the deaths merely random, revealing that God has no plan and ultimately that life is arbitrary or was the bridge’s collapse the long-ordained and deserved termination of the lives it took?
Claude Monet was inspired in the 1880s to produce numerous versions of the play of light on the Chinese-style bridge in his garden at Giverny.
BRIDGES OF DEATH AND REDEMPTION
Perhaps the most relentless literary pursuit of the bridge as symbol is Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina, a novel published in 1945 and inspired by Bosnia’s history and quest for independence and identity. The novel focuses on the town of Višegrad and the Mehmed Paša Sokolovi
In the novel – and in reality – the bridge is a mighty work. The Ottomans were skilled and prodigious bridge builders who, like the Romans before them, understood that bridges and roads were the means of expanding, holding and controlling a sprawling empire and of linking and unifying the diverse peoples that it contained. The Mehmed Paša Sokolovi
Sinan’s bridge over the Drina was nobly conceived – it was to measure 180 metres and cross the water by means of eleven stone-built pointed arches, each with spans of between 11 and 15 metres. In the novel, the Vizier had, as a boy, been kidnapped into slavery in Bosnia and resolved to build a bridge at Višegrad to purge his memories of initiation into slavery aboard a boat while crossing the Drina. The tale woven around fact tells of the harsh conditions and chaos of the initial phases of construction – marked by episodes of gruesome cruelty – gradually giving way to order, to harmony, and to final completion when the bridge becomes a source of pride and prosperity for Muslims and Christians alike.
The bridge, with its mid-span meeting place, assumed