The Trip Hammer

This picture exists because a committee chose its subject. In 1889 the Canonica foundation at the Brera Academy in Milan ran a competition on a set theme, and the theme that year was the trip hammer. Filippini entered and won it, with 2,200 lire.

What he handed in was a forge interior: men holding a piece of hot iron down on the anvil block while the great hammer head comes down on it. The trip hammer was old machinery by 1889, a water-driven beam that lifted and dropped, and it had shaped the iron of the Brescian valleys for centuries while newer works in the plain were moving to steam and rolling mills. He showed the canvas at the first Brera Triennale in 1891, alongside the hemp-scutching picture he had painted the same year.