“Pomodoro’s sculptures have the gift of recording space as pendulums record time. Like a maker of astrolabes and sundials, he is always in search of the right place to locate his recordertransformers.”  

Internationally established as one of the masters of post-war Italian sculpture, Arnaldo Pomodoro embarked in the 1980s on a kind of recapitulation of his career through major exhibitions such as the retrospective at Forte Belvedere, Florence, in 1986 with a presentation by the art critic Giulio Carlo Argan. Produced in nine copies, including the one in the Cerruti Collection, plus an artist’s proof, Giroscopio. Studio (Gyroscope. Study) is the preparatory study for the much larger Giroscopio I,¹ 380 centimetres in diameter and produced in four copies between 1986 and 1987, one of which is at the Italian embassy in Tokyo. The same subject was taken up ten years later in two small sculptures of 25 centimetres and 45 centimetres in diameter,² and then again in a work of 2002, where the composition is, however, reduced to a simple slab imprinted with the symbol of the euro, the new currency of the European Union, which had just come into circulation.³ 

In all of these cases, Pomodoro draws upon the structure of a geometrical figure derived from a physical device, the gyroscope, imagining a sculpture caged inside two hoops of metal, between which a circular relief is inserted like a large medal split into two halves that rotate around a fixed axis. In this way, the viewer can alter the arrangement of the sculpture and vary the combination of the two halffaces in relief. On these, the repertoire of cuneiform signs typical of Pomodoro’s work transforms the plane into a sort of cosmic space or lunar crust, from which geometric solids like the sphere and the cube emerge as though breaking the surface. The movement here is in the opposite direction to the deep, dark fissures that characterise his spheres and columns of the previous decade. Structural complexity is thus introduced into the theme of the disc developed during the 1970s in monumental forms, as in the Grande disco (Large Disc) of 1972,⁴ installed in Piazza Meda, Milan, in 1981, which is marked by a deep, radial gash that suggests a rift and dealignment of the smooth, reflecting surfaces with respect to the overall unity of the whole. At the same time, the theme of the splitting of a form along a longitudinal axis with a rotation of the two halves suggesting an effect of motion had been emblematically addressed two years earlier in Colpo d’ala. Omaggio a Boccioni (Wing Beat: Tribute to Umberto Boccioni, 1981-84),⁵ which seemed to take flight from the forecourt of Forte Belvedere in 1986. Alberto Arbasino spoke on that occasion of “shining and alarmed primary forms” internally “fractured by unquiet chasms where it is possible to glimpse the fangs of prehistoric dragons, remnants of ancient rotary presses, keys of old Olivetti typewriters”.⁶ 

In his Giroscopio, Pomodoro thus achieves a synthesis of his recurrent themes of the disc and the sphere,as well as the potential change in scale of the same motif through mechanical enlargement or reduction with no alteration in the impact of the image on the viewer. In this connection, Argan put forward a “humanistic” reading of a work “poised between the metaphysical and the mechanical, cosmology and clockwork” in his presentation of the 1986 retrospective: “Pomodoro’s sculptures have the gift of recording space as pendulums record time. Like a maker of astrolabes and sundials, he is always in search of the right place to locate his recordertransformers.” ⁷

Luca Pietro Nicoletti

¹ Gualdoni 2007, no. 807.

² Ibid., nos. 960 and 961.

³ Ibid., no. 1040.

⁴ Ibid., no. 543.

⁵ Ibid., no. 693.

⁶ Arbasino 1985, pp. 337-338.

⁷ G. C. Argan, “Pomodoro nel Forte di Belvedere a Firenze” [1986], in Berra, Leonetti 2000, p. 16.