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The white-hot bar goes into the rollers on long tongs and throws sparks the length of the bed. The men holding it work bare-armed and without gloves, a step from the metal.

Adolph Menzel was Germany's most honored painter of kings, a tiny, ferocious draughtsman who had spent decades on Frederick the Great. In 1872, at 56, he took his sketchbooks somewhere no major artist had worked before. It was the rail-rolling mill at Königshütte in Upper Silesia, one of the largest ironworks on the continent. He drew there for weeks, more than 100 studies of machines, rollers, tongs, faces, and the light that falls upward. The painting he built from them took three years, and when he exhibited it he gave it a second title in the old grand manner: Modern Cyclopes. The forge of the gods, relocated, with the gods removed from the payroll. The canvas runs on the mill's own clock. At the center a crew wrestles a white-hot bloom of iron into the rollers with long tongs, the glow lighting them from below like footlights. Behind them the flywheel of the steam engine turns in the dark. In the right corner, and this was the shock of the picture, a second crew eats. A young woman has carried the basket in, and the men sit against a press a yard from the heat. The mill does not stop and neither do the 12-hour shifts. At the left, men strip to the waist and wash off the shift that just ended. Work, food, sleepwalking exhaustion, all inside one shed with no sky. Menzel painted it without accusation and without romance, which is why it accused so effectively. The industrialist who bought it, Adolf von Liebermann, went bankrupt within months. The Nationalgalerie in Berlin took it off him for 30,000 Taler, nearly three times what he had paid. A factory now hung among the kings and battles. Germany was four years old as an empire and industrializing at a violence no country had matched. The painting became its mirror. Industrialists admired it as an epic of production. The socialist press read it as an accusation, made by a court painter. Menzel, characteristically, declined to referee. He had painted what the place did to bodies and let the century argue about whose fault the bodies were. He lived to 89 and was buried with honors a field marshal would envy. In this one canvas he left the machine age's founding group portrait. These are the men who made the rails that made everything else move, lit by the thing they were holding with tongs.