Diego Velázquez y Andrea Sacchi: un antecedente para "La fragua de Vulcano"

For over seventy years, historians have been wondering why Velázquez, while in Rome in 1630, chose such a rare subject, with almost no iconographic tradition, as Vulcan's Forge for his first profane history painting. Since 1939, a print by Antonio Tempesta, part of a series dedicated to Ovid's Metamorphoses, has often been proposed as the main visual source. In this article, a fresco of the same theme, that Andrea Sacchi painted in 1626 in Cardinal Del Monte's Casino by the Tiber and has recently returned to light, is presented as the immediate precedent that gave the Sevillian artist his first idea. This demonstrates the impact that Classicism, then dominant in Rome, had on him; corroborates the assumption that the two painters frequented each other's company; gives strength to the hypothesis that Velázquez attended the academies that Saccchi used to organise at his home; and finally, confirms the opinion that identifies history painting itself, that is, mere artistic reasons, as the real challenge which the Spaniard wanted to take on, shedding new light, beyond any possible iconological interpretation, on his creative process.