Apollo nella fucina di Vulcano

Velázquez painted this in Rome in 1630, on his first trip to Italy, with no commission behind it and nobody waiting to buy it. He was the Spanish king's court painter looking at Italian art up close for the first time, and you can feel him testing what he had learned. The subject is a piece of gossip from myth. Apollo has just walked into the smithy to tell Vulcan, the blacksmith god, that his wife Venus is sleeping with Mars. Vulcan turns from the half-forged metal with his mouth open, and the workers around him freeze at the same instant, still holding their hammers. Apollo arrives in a bright orange robe that Velázquez brought back from the Venetian painters he had been studying. He rolled the canvas up with his luggage and carried it home to Spain, where it hangs today in the Prado.