Visual Analysis of a Goya Painting at the Frick

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, although the figures are not: this would at least expain the ashy grey tone of the back walls and floor on which the figures find themselves. But the ultimate effect is to highlight the central figures, and make them seem as though they are engaged in a significant activity. It also establishes a curious relationship between the viewer and the subject: although we may imagine that we are standing inside the blacksmith shop with these three men, it also seems as though they are on stage or on display in a gallery, given the lack of realism in the backdrop. The viewer is seemingly placed alone with these figures engaged in their actions. But this seeming allegorical feel to the painting also undercuts any sense of narrative: we feel like we are looking at a sculpture. The story of the painting is the actions of the men.

Overall, Goya's technique seems to be focused on emphasizing the heavy physicality of their actions here. The foremost figure in the painting, the blacksmith, has his back to the viewer. The breeches on his left leg have come undone and fall around his ankle, on his right leg they are still tied up to his knee but coming loose: this indicates presumably the effect of the heavy physical motion of using the hammer on the hot metal. The musculature on the figure's bare left calf and bare left arm is likewise heavily defined, and even in the gloom of the interior space with its heavy chiaroscuro indicating a light source (probably the furnace) to the left outside the frame of the painting, we can still see the tensed muscles of his back and shoulders, his buttocks, his thighs. The youthful figure in the rear of the painting, who falls to the left of this central figure from the viewer's perspective, has his muscular tension and his visual focus directed on his part in the task, which is holding the hot metal with tongs: as a result, this figure is depicted mostly in terms of his contrapposto, which has him leaning in toward the anvil with his right foot angled against the floor to give him leverage, and the muscles of his bare forearms and hands are likewise depicted as tense and vivid -- in such an overall murky canvas, the flesh of the young man and the central blacksmith figure -- plus the white shirt of the blacksmith -- are the brightest things to be seen. The eye gravitates toward their centrality, and the complicated mix of angles that Goya has used to arrange these bright spots. This leaves the third man, whose position is complicated, and whose grey hair indicates a greater age than the other two: from the angle at which he bends, and from the glimpse of his left hand, it appears that he is operating a bellows. But his presence definitely makes the viewer think that we have three generations of men represented here: youth, adult, and old man.

The most astonishing thing about Goya's painterly technique here, though, is its fundamental unrealism. The facial features are discernible but they are not painted with a clarity or a particular attention to photographic realism: the young man's face is almost cartoonish, the old man's face is blurred and grey. The one spot of bright vivid color in the painting -- the glowing orange patch atop the anvil -- is almost an abstraction: we can hardly see what item these men are working on, we merely note its glaring bright color in the overall gloom of the canvas. Likewise Goya's brushwork frequently seems to be done with a palette knife, or at least geared to give a slightly improvised and blurred effect: the white lines on the left upper thigh of the blacksmith appear applied with a knife, as do the white highlights on the young man's upper right shoulder. The face of the old man seems to have been delineated entirely with a palette knife: the lines that indicate his beard and mouth seem too broad and rough for mere brushstrokes. It is astonishing to see, in a painting that would best be described as a form of social realism, that much of the actual painting seems more to anticipate Impressionism.