Brückenaffe

The Brückenaffe is a bronze sculpture of a grinning monkey sitting near the southern end of the Old Bridge in Heidelberg. It holds a mirror in its right hand and lifts its tail with its left. The figure replaces a series of sandstone monkeys that guarded the bridge since the fifteenth century. Those early sculptures reminded citizens that the bridge was a site of equality, where both royalty and commoners looked into the mirror and saw their own human nature reflected back at them.