Vebjørn Sand opens da Vinci bridge in the artist’s garden in France

The artist Vebjørn Sand in front of the Leonardo da Vinci bridge.Ås municipality in Norway.Photo. Morten F. Holm / SCANPIX

Artist Vebjørn Sand has  made six Leonardo bridges. The last in the series opens on Friday in the artist and Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci’s own garden, in central France.

– I fell in love immediately with the shape and was fascinated by the beauty. This is both art, science and philosophy, all unified by Leonardo . The bridge is a work of art, a piece of engineering  and architecture,  Sand says to newspaper Aftenposten.

Three years ago, Sand contacted the owners of the castle Clos Lucé, where da Vinci lived the last years of his life until he died in 1519. The opening of the bridge coincides with the 500 anniversary of Leonardo himself coming to the town of Amboise, where the castle is located.

Sand has based his work on sketches da Vinci 500 years ago. The first of the six bridges Sand has made based on the sketches goes over E6 in Ås and was opened in 2001. In 2006 he made a bridge out of the second layer of glacial ice in Antarctica, and the following year he made a new bridge of ice in New York. In 2009 he made ice bridges in Copenhagen and Greenland.
Sand wants to to build a da Vinci bridge on every continent, as a part of  the climate project Live Ice.

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today