Old oil painting of arched bridge: was this a real bridge?

[roncity]

Was ( or is ) this a real bridge?

I bought this print of an oil painting at a garage sale. It shows a stone arch bridge with an apartment building over the pier and women washing clothes in the river.
An engineer (?) standing under the arch on the river bank appears to be looking at the underside of the bridge. He is wearing a 3 corner hat .
The bridge appears to be Roman and maybe in southern Spain or Italy.
There are no artist initials or signatures, and the back is blank. A Web search found similiar style paintings by Dutch parinters in the 1800's but nothing close.

Just wondering ..was this a real bridge?

( I've tried to attach a photo )

 

[MikeHalloran]

The light on the near face seems to have reflected off a much larger structure out of the picture to the left... perhaps a replacement for this bridge, which at the right of the picture especially, has fallen into disarray.

The apartment building was clearly constructed as a tollhouse.

The hole clear through the bridge just under the deck is odd; I thought arch bridges were normally filled with rubble to stablize the arch and support the deck.


The arch's geometry is too imperfect for a standing bridge.

The thinness of the bridge over the keystone is implausible.

It's possible that it represents a real bridge, but must have been drawn from memory and imagination.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[Drumchaser]

Looks like a real one to me.

Antiques roadshow candidate.

 

[concretemasonry]

Probably a real painting, but painters can take some license between real life and imagination.

The thickness over the keystone is really too small to be true, but it made it possible to have the light for the area under the bridge. the hole must have been created for effect.

It certainly must have been old when constructed, since the image is probably from the 1700's.

Wouldn't have been nice to have digital cameras in that time period? - We would all know more!!

Dick

 

[jheidt2543]

It looks like a good restoration candidate, I mean the bridge. When does it go out for bid?

 

[jheidt2543]

Here is aa link to a photo of "The Tiffany Jewel" a five span masonry arch railroad bridge built in Tiffany, WI around the time of the Civil War. You can see that the arches were reinforce (1932) by shot-crete over rebar to accomodate the new heavier locomotives. But also notice how thin the origial stone arches were. This is a beautiful bridge and I was able to get a copy of the railroads construction drawings for the upgrade, including the graphical solution for the arch stresses. I did not take the picture shown.

http://bridgehunter.com/wi/rock/tiffany-stone/

 

[cvg]

quite a bit of similarity to the old London Bridge, built in the early 1800's before shotcrete

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LondonBridge_LakeHavasu.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge