The Sphere Within Sphere, also known as Sfera con Sfera, is a series of sculptures created by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro depicting an enormous metal sphere with a cracked surface revealing an intricate interior with another cracked sphere inside. Pomodoro originally created it for the Vatican Church in the 1960s, but later began building them for other organizations and can now be found in prime locations all over the world such as the Headquarters of the UN in New York, Trinity College in Dublin, The Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, USA, The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus and the Tel Aviv University in Israel, to name a few.
Arnaldo Pomodoro says that the inner ball represents the Earth and outer ball represents Christianity. The design of the internal layers which look like the gears or cogwheels of a complex machine symbolizes the fragility and complexity of the world.
“The sphere is a marvelous object, from the world of magic, wizards, whether it is of crystal or bronze, or full of water…It reflects everything around it, creating such contrasts that it sometimes is transformed, becoming invisible, leaving only its interior, tormented and corroded, full of teeth,” explained the artist. “That’s what drives me to make the spheres: breaking these perfect, magic forms in order reveal (find, discover) its internal ferment, mysterious and alive, monstrous and yet pure; so I create a discordant tension, a conflict, with the polished shine: a unity composed of incompleteness. In my sculpture, the shape of today’s world contains within itself the form of the ‘ideal city’ as conceived by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. This, in turn, contains my hopes and dreams, and those of countless other citizens of the world.”