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The white-hot bloom goes into the rollers on long tongs. Menzel spent weeks in the shed learning what the light does from below.

Adolph Menzel was Germany's most honored painter of kings, a tiny, ferocious draughtsman who had spent decades on Frederick the Great, and in 1872, at the age of 56, he took his sketchbooks somewhere no major artist had worked before: the rail-rolling mill at Königshütte in Upper Silesia, one of the largest ironworks on the continent. He drew there for weeks, hundreds of 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 lunch out of a tin a girl has carried in, sitting in the scrap iron a yard from the heat, because the mill does not stop and neither do the twelve-hour shifts; behind on the left, a third man washes 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 Nationalgalerie in Berlin bought it the year it was finished, the first factory to hang among the kings and battles. Germany was six years old as an empire and industrializing at a violence no country had matched, and the painting became its mirror: admired by industrialists as an epic of production, read by the socialist press as an indictment entered into evidence 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 90, was buried with honors a field marshal would envy, and left, in this one canvas, the machine age's founding group portrait: the men who made the rails that made everything else move, lit by the thing they were holding with tongs.