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.
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.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
