The Bridge of Ambrussum

The bridge in this painting is Roman. It carried the Via Domitia, the road the legions built to link Italy with Spain, across the little Vidourle river near Lunel in the south of France, and by Courbet's day only a broken stump of its arches was left standing. He painted it in 1857 while staying with the collector Francois Sabatier, whose estate was nearby. What strikes you is how unsentimental he is about the antiquity. A painter of the previous generation would have made the ruin poetic, half-swallowed by ivy and mood. Courbet just looks at the old stone, the water and the reflection, and reports what is there. The surviving arch stands doubled in its own still image on the surface of the stream.