Sphere Within Sphere

Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy's leading postwar sculptors, began his series of spheres in the nineteen sixties. He said he wanted to take a perfect form and break it to show what lay inside, both the machinery of the modern world and the fragility beneath any smooth surface. The contrast between the mirror finish and the corroded interior is the whole point; walk around the sphere so that your own reflection appears and disappears in it. The sculpture was cast at a foundry in Milan and is one of the largest in the series, which includes versions in New York, Dublin, Tehran and Milan.

The Vatican version was placed here in nineteen ninety, and its position was chosen carefully. Behind it stands the enormous ancient bronze Pigna, a pine cone four metres high that once decorated a fountain in Rome and gives the courtyard its name, and beyond that the niche designed by Bramante and Pirro Ligorio. A modern sphere facing a Roman pine cone across a Renaissance courtyard sums up what the Vatican Museums are: two thousand years of art in one place. Many visitors rush past on their way to the Sistine Chapel, but this is the best place in the museums to sit in the open air.

Did You Know? Pomodoro's first sphere was made for the Italian pavilion at the Montreal world exhibition of nineteen sixty seven, and versions of it now stand on four continents.