Dan Cruickshank’s Bridges: Heroic Designs that Changed the World

The Humber Bridge, linking Yorkshire to Lincolnshire, was opened in 1981, and was seen by the poet Philip Larkin as a great symbol of human existence. ‘Always’, he observed, ‘it is by bridges that we live’.

THE ART OF BRIDGES

Always bridges have been seen as things of breathtaking, elemental beauty, as audacious and epic engines of transformation. The profound role that bridges play, in all their symbolical and metaphoric richness, in our imaginations is revealed – and confirmed – by the works of poets, painters and writers. Shortly before the Humber Bridge in England opened in 1981 – a huge and daring suspension bridge whose span of 1,410 metres was until 1997 the widest in the world – Philip Larkin wrote a poem about the arrival of this new creation near his home town of Kingston-upon-Hull. For the first time ever, the mighty Humber Estuary, dividing those on its Lincolnshire south bank from the natives of Yorkshire on the opposite bank and defining the character of the area, had been bridged. Larkin pondered on the way the bridge transformed the landscape and communities and promised new life to all the area – even, as it were, to the dead: ‘Lost centuries of local lives that rose…Seem now to reassemble and unclose, All resurrected in the single span’. Larkin also saw the bridge – the act of bridging – as a great symbol of human existence, of the transition from the past to the present, from life to death and to rebirth: ‘Always it is by bridges that we live’.

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Larkin, although suspicious of change, clearly had a guarded enthusiasm for such bridges. So it is perhaps slightly disappointing that this particular great engine of transformation has never quite lived up to its promise and proposed purpose. The bridge remains magnificent and sound but not used by the numbers that were anticipated. The communities on each side of the Humber have not embraced the opportunity to mix quite as fully as Larkin and the bridge builders imagined. So in this case the bridge has taken on another symbolism, one somewhat removed from that envisioned by Larkin – and has become the personification of the ancient Greek concept of hubris, the excessive pride and daring arrogance that leads man to defy the gods, and by so doing, create the implacable mechanism of his own downfall.

Many painters, for reasons never fully explained, have not only included bridges in their works as seemingly peripheral objects, but have at times become obsessed by them, or by their apparent meanings. Indeed, for some artists, bridges have become veritable muses, objects that unleash the creative force of the imagination. In the romantically rude but also idyllic landscape that enfolds behind the Mona Lisa there is a bridge. It has several arches that appear semi-circular in form. It could be Roman. Why did Leonardo da Vinci include a bridge in this particular portrait? There are any number of possible answers, the least acceptable of which is that he was merely reproducing a landscape and details with which he was familiar, painting what he saw. The pioneering technique he used to render the landscape – depth is implied by the use of paler, misty-looking colours and by a softening of detail – gives all a naturalism and realism. But this is clearly a fictitious and unreal landscape and one pregnant with deep meaning – but what meaning?

Whatever the meaning, it matured over the years. Leonardo started the work in 1503 and seems to have taken around fifteen years to complete it, mulling over it, carrying it with him into France, putting it aside, then taking it up. It was his shadow, a thing haunting him. Is it really just a portrait of ma donna – 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 (#ulink_42b0cb2f-c119-53b1-bcf4-31d905e23760)). 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!’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

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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

Bridge over the Drina river and spans 400 years from the time the region, town and river were dominated first by the Muslim Ottoman Turks and then by the Christian Austro-Hungarian Empire. It chronicles the religious battles between the communities that co-existed in a border town on a river forming a frontier between different peoples – and the thread that holds the narrative together and that weaves through time is the bridge.

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

Bridge was completed in 1577 to the designs of the Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan on the orders of the Grand Vizier of Bosnia. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Golden Age of Ottoman power, the designer of the spectacular mid-sixteenth century Süleymaniye Mosque complex in Istanbul that remains an exemplary essay in the creation of an Islamic paradise on earth.

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 the symbolic – in many ways actual – role of town centre and focus of activities that gave the community identity and cohesion. Then decline sets in, the bridge loses its importance as a trade route and finally – in the novel and in reality – soon after the start of the First World War ceased to exist as any sort of route at all because retreating Austrian forces blew up a number of its arches as the enemy approached. As Andrew Saint has observed of the way the bridge is presented in this novel: ‘Here is an engineer’s story, [it is] about courage, effort and technique; about the benefits a magnificent and useful monument can confer across generations; about amazement at its construction and pride in its endurance’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He could have added that the story also talks of the way bridges can bring prosperity and unite communities.

The real-life story of the bridge across the Drina after the publication of the novel (that in 1961 won the Nobel prize for literature) has bizarre and brutal twists worthy of the darker moments of Andric’s imagination. The three arches destroyed in the First World War were repaired, as were the five subsequently destroyed in the Second World War and by the 1990s the bridge was regarded as a major historic and architectural monument of Yugoslavia. Then descended the dark and ancient shadow of hatred and cruelty. There was division, fragmentation, a return to religious war, the imposition of the ghastly mechanisms of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and land appropriation by the most violent means imaginable. In 1992 a large group of local Muslims were herded to the centre of the bridge – to the place of creative and convivial gatherings in Andric’s vision of the history of the bridge – and then flung off ‘and shot at for sport by Serbs as they fell’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The bridge, now again a place of calm and beauty but more than ever haunted, currently belongs to the Republic of Serbia. Few visit it: the suffering it has seen is too great for most to bear.

One bridge nearby, with a comparable history and story, I have explored in detail. The bridge at Mostar was completed in 1566 and with a single and elegant stone arch spanning 29 metres and rising 19 metres above the water, is one of the great engineering marvels of the Ottoman empire – a testimony to the taste, culture and scientific skills of the Muslim world that created it. The construction technique was ingenious – the limestone blocks were finely cut and their joints strengthened by the use of wrought iron pins, set in lead to prevent them rusting, expanding and cracking the stone. As in Andric’s story of the bridge at Drina, the bridge at Mostar – with what many at the time believed was the longest stone-built arched span in the world – became a great source of local pride and brought prosperity and distinction to the town. It also became the focus of customs and rituals – notably offering young Mostar males of all persuasions the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their virility to all who might be interested by leaping from the crown of the bridge into the generally shallow water below.

The history, beauty and technical excellence of this bridge proved its undoing. The same vicious conflict following the break-up of Yugoslavia that led to the deaths on the bridge across the Drina also engulfed Mostar. The town had a complex and mixed community – Orthodox Christian Bosnian Serbs, Slavic Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats – and in mid 1992 this long stable but potentially volatile community fragmented. Fighting flared on opposite sides of the bridge, each the territory of neighbours now in conflict. Outside forces arrived and the bridge became a target – this was culture very much in the firing line. The bridge was obviously of military and strategic significance in the fighting – but it was also a symbol, an emblem of Muslim presence, of Islamic culture. As such some of the fighting factions found it intolerable. Despite attacks, the bridge managed to survive until November 1993 when Croat forces finally shelled it to destruction.

When the fighting gradually died down, and Mostar found itself stabilized as part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was resolved that this cultural wonder must be rebuilt. This was not only to reclaim lost beauty and history, but was to be an act of reconciliation that would give Mostar back its heart, its identity and its role as a trading centre. The European Union got involved, money was made available by various states and an exemplary reconstruction took place utilizing as many of the old stones as possible and using traditional building materials and techniques. By July 2004 the great wrong had been put right and the noble bridge rebuilt. I saw it a few months later. It looked superb, as if the last ten years had never been. Mostar has its wonderful bridge back, the ancient trade routes are reconnected, and customs revived. Even while I was there muscular young men were gaily tossing themselves off the top of the arch to splash into the water far below. But near the bridge I spied a stone standing against a wall, and on the stone was written, ‘Don’t forget’. The stark and powerful words provoked memories of ancient, prophetic texts, especially those touching on mortality and transience. I looked up the famous lines from the eleventh century Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘The moving finger writes: and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line. Nor all your tears wash out a word of it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yes indeed, we are ‘weighed in the balance, and…found wanting’ (Daniel, 5:27). A bridge, for all its engineering wonder and potential symbolism, is in many ways just a bridge, a physical fact. The sign near the bridge at Mostar, I suppose, is saying that some things when lost cannot be found, that it is easier to mend a broken bridge than it is a broken heart.

Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in November 2004. The beautiful mid-sixteenth century bridge had recently been reconstructed after its destruction in 1993, but the words written on a stone nearby – ‘Don’t Forget’ – were a reminder that the intense emotions that had been aroused by the destruction of the bridge (a symbol of Muslim culture as well as a military target) – had not been fully pacified by its rebuilding.

The bridges at Višegrad and Mostar have, by turn, been symbols of identity, despair, death and redemption. Other bridges have not had such emotional, roller coaster rides but, nevertheless, have still enjoyed extraordinary existences that have made them central to the life of their city or nation and so much more than just routes of communication or means of crossing a great divide. The Széchenyi chain bridge in Budapest, stretching 375 meters across the Danube and completed in 1849, launched the fortunes of the city and has become a symbol of Hungarian pride and liberty (see page 245 (#litres_trial_promo)). Similarly, although for differing reasons, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York (see page 284 (#litres_trial_promo)), the Sydney Harbour Bridge (see page 218 (#litres_trial_promo)), and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (see page 228 (#litres_trial_promo)) have all become the much-loved emblems of the cities in which they stand. These were all, in their time and in their different ways, bold technical pioneers and creations of epic scale and ambition. But earlier ages have also produced bridges with comparable emotional punch. There were the paradise bridges of Persia (see page 118 (#litres_trial_promo)), the great pious works of medieval France, such as the bridges at Avignon and Orléans (see pages 92 (#litres_trial_promo) and 82 (#ulink_1cdcb691-922e-57ed-8185-6fcae413cbd8)), and of central Europe.

THE ALCHEMICAL BRIDGE

The Charles Bridge in Prague, the Czech Republic, is perhaps the best-known man-made object in a city packed with architectural wonders. The bridge has an extraordinary life and history, and a great importance. When completed in the very early fifteenth century the 516-metre-long, stone-built, sixteen-arch bridge not only connected the two halves of the city in spectacular style (an earlier ramshackle affair had been swept away in the 1340s) but also, as the only route across the mighty river Moldau (Vltava) formed a vital trade route that – almost literally – connected Europe to the east. It was – in fact as well as fancy – a bridge between worlds, with both its ends secured by robust guard towers.

The importance of the bridge was recognized from the moment construction started. The foundation stone was laid in 1357 with, it is alleged, the Emperor Charles IV insisting that the event take place at 5.31 am on 9 July. Royal astronomers, mathematicians and those learned men consulted had, apparently, ordained that this moment was auspicious because it enshrined a palindrome comprising all the odd numbers 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1. A palindrome is a sequence of numerals or letters – sometimes arranged in a ‘magic square’ – that either reads the same from different directions or possesses different meanings or pronunciations when read from different direction. For example, ‘a man, a plan, a canal, Panama’ has the same letters from either direction but is not pronounced the same from either direction – to grasp the point try saying ‘amanap lanac a nalp a nam a’.

Medieval Prague was indeed a meeting place of east and west, a melting pot of different cultures and religions. It had a large Jewish community from as early as the tenth century but this suffered waves of persecution culminating in the late twelfth century with an obligation imposed on all Jews to settle in an enclave on the east bank of the Moldau, near the main city square – and thus was created the first Jewish Ghetto. In the mid fourteenth century Charles IV relinquished some of the state power of the Jewish community, and perhaps even consulted rabbis about the construction of the bridge. These men would undoubtedly have enshrined the ancient esoteric wisdom of the Kabbalah, the branch of mystic Judaism devoted to the quest for the origin of life, of creation, and of the nature of the relation between God and man.

A key part of this quest – the code that could explain all – was language itself, in particular the twenty-two ‘foundation letters’ of the Hebrew alphabet which Kabbalists believed was the creation and direct gift of God and pregnant with many layers of meaning. One of the most important Kabbalistic texts – the 2,000 year old Sepher Yetzirah or Book of Creation – states most directly that God ‘ordained’ the letters of the alphabet: ‘He hewed them, He combined them, He weighed them, He interchanged them. And He created with them the whole creation and everything to be created in the future’. So if Kabbalistic rabbis were involved with the ritual of the foundation of the bridge, then the ceremony was evidently of a deeply mysterious nature, akin to casting a spell. This was the age of alchemy and of miraculous transformation, of the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the ‘elixir of life’ and of attempts to transmute base matter into fine, the material into the spiritual. The construction site of the bridge could have been seen as a vast alchemical laboratory, for bridges are, in their way, a form of alchemy – they transform, they bring life. As Philip Larkin wrote in 1981: ‘All will be ‘resurrected in the single span’.

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A significant clue to the meaning of the foundation ceremony, and to the power of the Kabbalah in fourteenth-century Prague, lies in the story of one of the most remarkable alleged inhabitants of the medieval city – the golem. This is a creature of Jewish legend that – like Adam – is made of mud, but animated by man not God. In consequence the golem was a parody of divine creation, a mere perverse shadow of humanity, lacking a soul but desiring one and given to hubristic displays leading to chaos and, eventually, self destruction. The golem is mentioned in the Talmud and implied in several Old Testament texts, notably Psalm 139:14-16. Here, in most mystic fashion, a being seemingly full of pride addresses God and says: ‘I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned’. An ‘unperfect’ or unshaped substance in Yiddish is ‘goylem’.

The Charles Bridge in Prague was started in 1357 and its fine array of Baroque religious statues was added from the 1680s, turning a stroll across the bridge into a virtual Roman Catholic pilgrimage.

The means of animation was by tradition a deep and closely guarded secret but involved the Kabbalah and the use of certain letters from the Hebrew alphabet and magic words from, no doubt, the ‘book’ in which all about the golem was ‘written’. To deactivate his creation the magician, for such he was, had to remove letters from words to transform their meaning. For example, one legend says, that to bring the golem to life the word ‘truth’ has to be written in Hebrew on its forehead, and to kill it a letter has to be removed from that word that changes its meaning from ‘truth’ to ‘death’. Or to kill the golem the magician had to pronounce the animating word – the magic palindrome – backwards.

For reasons now lost in myth, the golem became closely associated with Prague and, in legend, was created and animated by rabbis as a means of protecting the inhabitants of the ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks. In the early nineteenth century the writer Berthold Auerbach went so far as to identify the learned late-sixteenth-century Prague rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel as the creator of a golem. Interesting, at this very time, the emperor Rudolf II gave active encouragement to alchemists at his court in Prague as they pursued their various vital and curious quests.

Given all this, and assuming some mystic intent, it must be assumed that the palindromic foundation time and date was intended to give the bridge some special quality – to protect it presumably, but perhaps even animate it in some way. And there is another peculiarity about the bridge. Legend says eggs were mixed into the mortar used to bind the stone and recent analysis suggests the old mortar does indeed contain some unusual organic matter.

Why eggs? Well, it is possible that their addition hardened or improved the mortar in some practical manner. But also, of course, eggs are pretty universally regarded as emblems of life, virility, of creation – especially, as it happens, in Islam where mosques often contain an ostrich egg. I remember seeing – to my surprise – a couple perched on the roof of the massive mud-built mosque in Djenne, Mali. The 79th sura, or chapter, of the Koran explains all. This sura – entitled rather intriguingly ‘The Soul Snatchers’ – starts by warning that the hearts of all humanity – including ‘those who snatch away men’s souls’ – will ‘on the day the Trumpet sounds its first and second blast…be filled with terror’. The sura then goes on to discuss creation and states that God ‘spread the earth, and, drawing water from its depth, brought forth its pastures’. This is one English translation of the seventh century Arabic of the original text.

(#litres_trial_promo) Other English translations use slightly different words, but in the original Arabic text is the word ‘daha’, which can be taken to mean an elliptical, geoid or, indeed, an ostrich-egg shape. Did the Arabs of the seventh century really know, as suggested through the revelation of the Koran, that the world was of spherical form? This would be an extraordinary insight for the time and is one that current Islamic scholars use to support their argument that the Koran is truly the word of God, for in the seventh century only He knew the shape of the world.

‘Assuming some mystic intent...the palindromic foundation time and date was intended to give the bridge some special quality – to protect it presumably, but perhaps even animate it in some way.’

So eggs had huge and ancient symbolic meaning in the fourteenth century, particularly in those countries of central Europe relatively close to the borders with Islam and familiar with its religious beliefs and customs. Were they added to the material body of the Charles Bridge – originally called simply the Stone Bridge – as part of some magic or religious ritual to quicken it? This is perhaps not as odd as it sounds. Stone has been venerated by different peoples and religions throughout time. The Ka’ba in Mecca – the holiest place in Islam – enshrines a stone, now called ‘the Black Stone’, that is perhaps a meteorite. In Islamic belief the stone fell from heaven – a gift of God – for Adam and Eve to use as an altar and was later used by Abraham. Whatever the truth, this stone was an ancient sacred object well before the rise of Islam. The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem covers a pinnacle of stone held sacred by both Muslims and Jews because they believe it to be both the rock on which Abraham proposed to sacrifice Isaac, and the veritable Foundation Stone of God’s creation mentioned in the Book of Isaiah where God says: ‘…Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone…a precious corner stone, a sure foundation’. (Isaiah 28:16).

When Jews pray towards the west or ‘Wailing’ wall of the Temple they are in fact facing the buried body of the stone that peeps above the surface within the Dome of the Rock. They are praying towards what many believe to be Mount Moriah, now embraced by the Temple Mount and which, as the place where all things started, bears, as it were, the direct traces of God’s presence. And for Christians, rocks are an ever-present imagery (see page 91 (#litres_trial_promo)). Christ told Peter that he was his ‘rock’ upon which he would build his church (Matthew 16:18) and referred to himself as the ‘stone which the builders rejected’ – prophesized in the 118th Psalm – that would ‘become the head of the corner’ – which is to say the foundation stone of the church of redemption, (Matthew 12:10).