Captain America Grips Mjolnir Amid Rising Embers — Print & Oil Painting

Nine tenths of this surface is near black or deep umber, which gives it the lowest brightness reading in the group by a wide margin. The darkness has been spent carefully, because every lit thing in the picture belongs to a single warm source burning somewhere below the bottom edge of the frame.

He is turned three quarters into that light with the helmet on, and the modelling runs upward: the underside of the jaw, the lower lip, the ridge of the nose and the inner rim of the mask all take the glow, while the crown of the head disappears. The suit is charcoal scale with an armoured plate at the shoulder carrying a red Avengers mark, and the shield shows only as a curve of red and off white across the bottom right corner.

The hammer is held up in his left hand at chest height, and it is the coolest object in a hot picture. Its head is a plain rectangular block of grey metal with a hard specular line along the top edge, the shaft is bound in dark cord, and the whole thing has been left almost untouched by the orange around it, as though the heat cannot get a purchase on it.

Sparks fill the rest of the space. Hundreds of small embers rise on both sides in loose diagonal drifts, some sharp, most blurred into short streaks, and behind his shoulder a bank of dull orange fire glows through the smoke without ever resolving into flame. The saturation reading is high while the brightness is very low, which is the signature of a picture made almost entirely of embers.

Fire is the right weather for that object. The stories have it beaten out of a metal called uru by dwarf smiths who needed the heat of a star to work it and used a dying one, at a cost the forge nearly did not survive. Setting the hammer in a shower of rising sparks puts it back into the conditions it came out of. Part of our Marvel collection, next to the same hammer carried at a run through ruins and the hammer held in cold blue lightning instead of fire.