City with Stone Bridge 1865

Rodolphe Bresdin created this print, "City with Stone Bridge," sometime in the 19th century, now at the Art Institute of Chicago. The eye is immediately drawn to the intricate network of lines defining the buildings and the sky, creating an almost dreamlike atmosphere. Bresdin's technique, a dense accumulation of marks, invites us to consider the relationship between form and representation. The city, rendered in meticulous detail, verges on abstraction. The bridge and the water in the foreground are connected by a mirroring effect with the city and sky in the background, creating a cohesive, almost symbolic relationship between the two. The overall composition challenges traditional notions of perspective, flattening the image and emphasizing the surface. In doing so, Bresdin anticipates the modernist rejection of illusionism, pushing us to recognize the artwork as a constructed reality, a network of signs rather than a mirror of the world. This emphasis on the materiality of the medium underscores the artwork's self-referential nature, inviting us to contemplate the very act of seeing.