are a great paradox, they not only use nature against nature, but magically the best examples do not defeat or damage nature but enhance it, and, in ways that are sometimes hard to fathom, achieve a deep harmony with their surroundings. For these reasons bridges have captured the imagination of people through the ages and now they are the only large-scale and radical examples of modern design and construction that the public generally applaud. All can see that bridges stand for something most significant, for the indomitable human spirit, the love of daring and of challenge, the power of invention.
Bridges, of course, inhabit worlds way beyond the merely physical and visual. Having excited human imagination they have, for centuries, possessed a powerful symbolism. They have been seen as links between this world and the next, as symbols of transition, and as metaphors for life and death on earth, and of the journey of the soul to the afterlife – the means of crossing the great divide. This symbolism and fancy have, occasionally, been reinforced by fact, for some bridges have, quite literally and rivetingly, been bridges between worlds and have possessed almost more meaning than physical substance. For example, the stone-arched Bridge of Sighs in Venice, built in 1602 by Antonio Contino (who had earlier worked for his uncle Antonio da Ponte on the Rialto Bridge, see page 158) that formed a covered way between the interrogation rooms in the Doge’s Palace and the adjoining prison. It has long been assumed that the small windows in the bridge offered convicted prisoners their last view of Venice or of life. The idea of the bridge as a metaphor for transition or for a journey of the spirit seems universal. In fifteenth century Peru, the Inca saw the rainbow as a bridge between their homeland and heaven, while some of the indigenous people of Australia conceive of the link between worlds taking the form of the vast, arching and bridging body of the rainbow serpent, a creature as it happens that is most similar to the Lebe snake, the bridge-like ancestor of the Dogon people of Mali, Africa.
The Zhaozhou or Anji Bridge, Hebei province, China, completed in AD 605: an object in which form is dictated by function to achieve beauty and eternal elegance.
Detail of one of the arched and open spandrels of the Zhaozhou or Anji Bridge. This is the world’s oldest surviving open-spandrel, segmental arched bridge built in stone. The joints between the masonry blocks forming the arches are reinforced by wrought-iron bars or cramps.
For all these reasons bridges have been applauded as heroic, sacred – almost mystic – works by all cultures. Bridges of great scale or span were venerated in Medieval Europe, either as pious works that glorified God or as almost impossible acts of daring that could only have been achieved with the aid of the Devil (see page 94). Great bridges were, people assumed, creations that could only be completed through prayer and divine guidance or by the sale of the soul to dark forces. They were places where you could meet angels and saints as if conducting you to Heaven, or the Devil himself collecting his toll. Similarly in China: the truly remarkable Zhaozhou or Anji Bridge in Hebei province, built between 595 and 605 AD to the designs of Li Chun and the world’s oldest open-spandrel segmental arched masonry bridge, is particularly rich in myth, legend and stories of the supernatural. This is mainly because its construction methods and ambitious scale – its main arch of segmental forms spans a mighty 37.7 metres – astonished most contemporary observers. Li Chun achieved the wide span of the bridge by using 28 parallel and abutting arches, each formed with massive, precisely cut and wedged limestone voussoirs whose joints were strengthened with wrought-iron cramps or bars. The arch-topped open spandrels not only reduce the weight of the bridge without weakening it but also – by creating additional openings through its body – protect the bridge from being washed away by the force of unusually high and powerful flood waters. These novel design features and construction techniques gave the bridge great strength but also the flexibility necessary to withstand earthquakes.1
Li Chun – clearly a man of advanced practical know-how – was himself not ignorant of the worlds of magic and of the spirits. The bridge is of pure, simple and practical design yet the keystones at the crown of the main arch are embellished with carvings that show the leering and horned heads of the Taotie motif. These beings from the spirit world were intended to protect the bridge from floods and from the potentially malevolent spirits of the river that might resent the bridge, for it robbed them of some of their power over those mortals who wanted to cross the water. In a Taoist culture, where all is animated and nature is seen as the great guide and inspiration, everything is alive – not just the river but the stones from which the bridge is made and, indeed, the bridge itself.
One legend about the bridge is like those attached to many European medieval bridges of prodigious span or slender form: it was constructed by an inspired human, in this case the fifth century BC engineer and philosopher Lu Ban, working with the aid of spirits. Another legend is that two Taoist Immortals – perfected beings who are masters of time and space and travel between the earth and the distant stars – decided to test the strength of this unprecedented bridge by thundering across it in tandem. The bridge survived this ordeal just as it survived resentful water spirits and – perhaps more impressively – earthquakes and centuries of neglect. It still stands, still does the job for which it was built 1,400 years ago, and continues to inspire and astonish – a thing of perpetual delight and timeless beauty that contrives, despite all it has seen and suffered, to look eternally youthful and modern.
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’.2
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
