Today, the challenge for most pilgrims to Natural Bridge is rekindling some facsimile of the awe that earlier visitors experienced. The site has been so frequently photographed, and those images so often reproduced and now Instagrammed, that standing in its presence feels more like meeting a celebrity than an encounter with the sublime. I was glad to see it towering above me, but it took a conscious effort to connect with the power it must have had before images of Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains defined a new standard of the American scenic grandeur.
An exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond helps make sense of the expectations, the mild disappointment and even some of the embarrassment the future king of France and I felt. “Virginia Arcadia: The Natural Bridge in American Art” surveys the bridge as icon and propaganda from its earliest appearance in the visual record through its glory days as a symbol of the early republic, and on to the long tail of its afterlife as a wayside attraction, tourist trap and, now, state park. Even more than a visit to the arch itself, the paintings, drawings, prints and photographs in the exhibition force one to think about the curious way in which claiming and exalting the natural landscape has been part of the great American inferiority complex since before the country existed.
Jefferson’s reaction to the bridge, the scenic jewel of a 157-acre plot he purchased from King George III in 1774, was recorded in his “Notes on Virginia.” From the top of the bridge, looking over the precipice to the creek below inspired terror, but seen safely from below, he wrote, the arch “is delightful in an equal extreme.” This was a classic statement of a philosophical category of great interest at the time — the sublime — which was related to but distinct from beauty. Things that were beautiful were understood to be orderly, in harmony, balanced, proportionate to themselves and generally integrated into a world that was either man-made or served man’s purposes. But what about the delight we take in things that are enormous, wild or chaotic, such as a turbulent seascape, a dense, dark forest or a violent thunderstorm?
For this, the sublime was pressed into service, and one philosopher, Immanuel Kant, gave it a specific twist: There are things that are spectacular and terrifying that don’t actually scare us, thus confirming a higher sense of our dominion or rational mastery of them.
This seems to be the idea suggested by the first painting encountered in the VMFA exhibition, Caleb Boyle’s rather static portrait of Jefferson (ca. 1801), with the arch behind him. The artist’s perspective renders Jefferson larger than the arch itself, making it seem as though the bridge forms a niche from which Jefferson has emerged, or a low portal to the land beyond.