Bridge in Pisa

A view of one of Pisa's bridges spanning the Arno, a recurring motif for travelers to the city alongside the cathedral square. The composition likely uses the bridge's arches and railing as a structural armature, with the river and embankments providing horizontal bands suited to bokashi gradation. Bridges had been central to Japanese woodblock since Hokusai and Hiroshige, and sosaku-hanga artists inherited the subject while reframing it through the carved-block vocabulary of the creative print: visible woodgrain in flat water, chisel-mark contour, registration deliberately preserved rather than concealed. Ono's Italian subjects from this period—the Pompei road, the Pisa slums, the after-rain scenes—form a consistent body of work in which European urban architecture is filtered through techniques and habits formed in his Tokyo prints of the 1930s, when bridges, factories, and workers were his primary subjects and the carved line carried both descriptive and political weight.