The Forge of Vulcan 1660

Luca Giordano made this scene of Vulcan’s forge in oil paint, sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century. The material Giordano used most emphatically is not metal, of course, but pigment! It’s all the more fascinating, then, to consider how convincingly he rendered the qualities of iron. Consider its texture – glowing orange where hot, cooling to black. The sheer brute force of the smiths is on full display; their labor is what shapes the metal. And in that sense, Giordano’s own labor – the art of image-making – is parallel to the blacksmiths. He is taking base materials – ground minerals mixed with oil – and turning them into an image that glows with life. It’s easy to overlook the sheer amount of work involved in a painting like this. Next time you look at a painting, try to think about it not just as a picture, but as a made thing, the product of skilled work.