Goya, The Forge
Francisco Goya's "The Forge" is a realist painting that relies upon the earlier mythological genre to accomplish its meaning, a meaning which it can be argued is implicitly political. In reality, Goya appears to be painting a scene of village life: three men (a youth, an adult, and an old man) are working in a village smithy, hammering a piece of glowing metal on an anvil. Goya is representing ordinary working men here, so the painting is most properly called realist. However, the subject and composition are heavily reminiscent of a regular topos of mythological painting, the forge of Vulcan: examples before Goya are readily found, ranging from Diego Velazquez, Alessandro Gherardini, Pietro da Cortona, Luca Giordano, or even the rather ridiculous Rococo treatments of the theme by Francois Boucher. It is not necessary to know if Goya knew or made reference to any specific earlier treatment of the topos, however. What Goya is doing is domesticating a heroic and mythological subject -- and in this case, his audience is primarily himself. Like most of Goya's paintings of ordinary people, "The Forge" was not produced for Goya's royal patrons but for the artist himself. However it may be argued that Goya's meaning here is, on a number of levels, as explicitly political as the artist frequently was.
The composition and structure of "The Forge" make it seem more starkly allegorical than it really is. This is because Goya organizes the painting around the three central figures surrounding the anvil, while allowing the background of the painting to be largely undifferentiated, a grey gloom in which the smithy shop is seemingly not represented at all. Strong horizontal lines on the right side of the canvas -- in the center and below -- do give us some sense of an architectural interior space, but they barely find counterparts on the left side of the canvas. The overall effect would seem to be that the interior space is largely obscured by smoke, perhaps,...
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