Arnaldo Pomodoro valuation
Polished bronze spheres and columns, broken open to show the machinery inside.
Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Romagna in 1926, trained as a surveyor and worked as a goldsmith and stage designer before sculpture.
What a work by Arnaldo Pomodoro is worth
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Bio
Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in Romagna in 1926, trained as a surveyor and worked as a goldsmith and stage designer before sculpture. The signature form arrived in the 1960s: a perfect geometric solid — sphere, disc, column, cube — in highly polished bronze, with its surface torn or cut open to reveal a dense interior of teeth, rods and machine-like structures, as though the smooth outside were a shell over something unresolved. His spheres stand at the United Nations in New York, the Vatican Museums, Trinity College Dublin and the Farnesina in Rome. He worked into his late nineties and died in 2025.
Bronzes are editioned, usually in small numbers, at a wide range of sizes from tabletop to monumental, and cast number, foundry, date and size are what a valuation rests on; the same form at two scales is two quite different works. The polished surfaces are the whole point and are unforgiving — scratches, dents and repolishing all show, and a repatinated or over-polished cast loses the contrast between mirror exterior and matt interior that the piece depends on. The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro holds the archive.
At a glance
- Born
- 23 June 1926, Morciano di Romagna
- Died
- 22 June 2025, Milan
Morciano, Milan and the Sphere within Sphere
Pomodoro was born at Morciano di Romagna and trained at the Technical Institute for Surveyors in Rimini, where he also learned goldsmithing. Picasso's Guernica, shown at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 1953, made a strong impression on him, and in 1954 he moved to Milan, where he became friends with Lucio Fontana and Enrico Baj and worked alongside his brother Giò Pomodoro. He won the international prize for sculpture at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963.
He received the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 1990, the year a Sfera con Sfera was installed in the Cortile della Pigna of the Vatican Museums, and in 1996 Italy gave another to the United Nations. The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro was set up in Milan in 1995. He died at home in Milan in June 2025, the day before his 99th birthday.
America, Expo 67 and the theatre
A grant took Pomodoro to the United States in 1959, where he met Mark Rothko in San Francisco and, in New York, Franz Kline, David Smith and Louise Nevelson, and in 1964 the Museum of Modern Art bought his Sphere I. He taught at Stanford, Berkeley and Mills College from 1966, and the Sfera Grande he made for the Italian Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal is the sphere that now stands in front of the Farnesina in Rome. His first large work, La Colonna del Viaggiatore, was made for Spoleto in 1962 and given to the town.
He also designed for the theatre, and won the Ubu prize for his sets for Genet's The Screens in 1990 and again in the 1991 to 1992 season for Koltès's In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. From 1990 he ran the TAM centre for young metalworkers at Pietrarubbia in the Montefeltro, where he had spent much of his childhood, and between 1977 and 1991 he gave 33 sculptures, 47 works on paper and 23 pieces of jewellery and medals to the CSAC archive of the University of Parma.
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