Arnaldo Pomodoro, world-renowned Italian sculptor with California ties, dies at 98

ROME — Arnaldo Pomodoro, one of Italy’s most prominent contemporary artists whose bronze spheres decorate iconic public spaces from the Vatican to the United Nations, has died at age 98, his foundation said Monday.

Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday, according to a statement from Carlotta Montebello, director general of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation.

Pomodoro’s massive spheres are instantly recognizable: shiny, smooth bronze globes with clawed-out interiors that Pomodoro has said referred to the superficial perfection of exteriors and the troubled complexity of interiors.

In a note of condolences, Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli said Pomodoro’s “wounded” spheres “speak to us today of the fragility and complexity of the human and the world.”

The Vatican’s sphere, which occupies a central place in the Pigna Courtyard of the Vatican Museums, features an internal mechanism that rotates with the wind. “In my work I see the cracks, the eroded parts, the destructive potential that emerges from our time of disillusionment,” the Vatican quoted Pomodoro as saying about its sphere.

The United Nations in New York received a 3.3-meter (10 foot, eight inch) diameter “Sphere Within Sphere” sculpture as a gift from Italy in 1996. The U.N. sphere has refers to the coming of the new millennium, the U.N. said: “a smooth exterior womb erupted by complex interior forms,” and “a promise for the rebirth of a less troubled and destructive world,” Pomodoro said of it.

Other spheres are located at museums around the world and outside the Italian foreign ministry, which has the original work that Pomodoro created in 1966 for the Montreal Expo that began his monumental sculpture project.

In the 1960s, he taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Mills College. “Rotante dal Foro Centrale,” part of Pomodoro’s “Sfera con Sfera” series, can be found at the west entrance of the Berkeley campus. In 1988, Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita presented the sculptor’s “Colpa d’ala (Wing Beat)” as a gift to Los Angeles to mark the 40th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. It is installed downtown at the Department of Water and Power (now the John F. Ferraro Building).

Pomodoro was born in Montefeltro, Italy, on June 23, 1926. In addition to his spheres, he designed theatrical sets, land projects and machines.

Winfield writes for the Associated Press.