Galata Bridge: The "Mona Lisa of Bridges"

Abstract

Between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, in a letter perhaps sent from Genoa, which has reached us only in Ottoman, Leonardo offered Sultan Bayezid II the project for a bridge between Constantinople and Pera. Evidence of this appears in a small drawing preserved in the Institut de France in Paris: the bridge was a single span, with “dovetail” abutments and 40 mt high. The proposal was not accepted by the Sultan, who commissioned Michelangelo, who however never went to Istanbul. In the 1990s, the then mayor of Istanbul Erdoğan recovered Leonardo’s project and the artist Vebjørn Sand made a smaller copy - in wood - in Norway. In 2012, strong in his neo-Ottoman policy, Erdoğan, having become in the meantime the Turkish Prime Minister, announced its imminent construction, which however was not implemented and disappeared definitively from the news. The bridge, long considered unfeasible, underwent a structural test by MIT in Boston in 2019 with positive results.