#etching

Apparently this is from before Boccioni signed onto Futurism in 1910 — a movement that made a point of rejecting quiet domestic scenes just like this one.

This is from years before Boccioni co-signed the Futurist manifesto and started painting industry as speed and noise instead of smoke drifting over a quiet field.

The name it goes by comes from money — the story is that a copy once changed hands for a sum that was outrageous for a print, and it stuck. It isn't one moment either: from what I've read he packed several separate things from the same chapter of the Bible into a single scene, so people are being healed, argued with and turned away all at once.

These were sold as a set of eighty, in an ordinary shop rather than anywhere grand, and pulled off sale after a couple of weeks — the usual explanation is that he got nervous about the Inquisition. This one was meant to open the second half, and there's a note attributed to him saying the idea is that reason and imagination go wrong without each other. Whether that's the whole story, I couldn't tell you.

Most of what I could find reads this one as being about marriage — a knot you couldn't get out of in Spain at the time. It's plate 75 of the same set of eighty. The owl I can't explain, and nobody I read seemed sure either.