The most modern subject he could find
Boccioni had spent his twenties painting in a careful, dappled, modern-but-polite manner. Now he had signed his name to a manifesto demanding speed, machines, and the present tense. So he went looking for a subject that was, in 1910, the most aggressively modern thing in Italy, and he found it on the edge of his own city. Milan was under construction. Out past the old center, in the growing industrial suburbs, fields were becoming factories, and the painting’s subject is exactly this: a building site, men and horses doing heavy labor amid scaffolding, smokestacks, and the raw skeleton of buildings going up.
For four centuries a canvas this big (it is nearly ten feet wide) was reserved for the important subjects: a battle, a coronation, a saint, a myth. A construction site full of sweating workmen and dray-horses was the opposite of important. It was the kind of scene a respectable academic painter would never have stretched ten feet of canvas for. Boccioni took that lowly, ordinary, modern subject (men at heavy work, building the future) and gave it the scale, the violence, and the seriousness the old academy had saved for war.
A title that says it plainly: “The Work”
We should be careful about dates, because the painting carries two. The canvas was painted in 1910. The following year, in 1911, Boccioni showed it at an exhibition in Milan called the Mostra d’arte libera, and there he gave it a different, blunter title: Il lavoro, which is simply Italian for “The Work” or “Labour.”(You’ll sometimes see the painting dated “1910–11” because of this, but that 1911 is the exhibition, not a second year of painting. The picture is a 1910 picture.)
That early title is a useful key, because it tells you what Boccioni thought the painting was about before any critic decided for him. Not “the city,” not yet. The Work. Labor itself, the physical job of dragging the modern world into being, made monumental. The grander title we use now, The City Rises, came later and points at the scaffolding in the back; Boccioni’s own first title points at the straining bodies in the front. Both are in the picture. Hold the second one (the labor) as you walk up to the canvas, because the men are easy to miss next to the thing standing over them.
Because the thing standing over them is a horse. And it is enormous, and it is red, and it is the engine of the whole picture. That is what we look at next.