Pomodoro Sphere Within A Sphere At Trinity College Dublin

The Urban Cartographer

Explore the history behind Arnaldo Pomodoro’s iconic bronze sculpture, Sfera con Sfera, situated on the forecourt of the Eavan Boland Library at Trinity College Dublin. Discover how the piece succeeded Henry Moore’s King and Queen to become a masterclass in modern public art and brutalist architectural dialogue.

TECHNICAL STUFF

MOBILE FRIENDLY AND MUCH FASTER

GO THERE
MURALS BY SHANE SUTTON      
 Leica Q3 
Presented By  William Murphy - The Urban Cartographer - LEICA Q3 Photographed 9 October 2026 

Pomodoro Sphere Within A Sphere At Trinity College Dublin

Author: William Murphy - The Urban Cartographer

 | 

11. Oct 2026

THE LEICA Q3 PERFORMED MUCH BETTER TODAY

The Urban Cartographer Presents:

Pomodoro Sphere Within A Sphere

Photographed By William Murphy Using A Leica Q3

At Trinity College Dublin

The Sphere on the Forecourt: Art, Architecture, and Arnaldo Pomodoro at Trinity College Dublin

Standing on the granite forecourt outside the Eavan Boland Library at Trinity College Dublin, one struggles to imagine the space without its defining visual anchor: a monumental bronze orb, fractured open to reveal an intricate, gear-like core.

Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sfera con Sfera (Sphere Within Sphere) has become central to the university’s modern architectural identity. Yet its commanding position was neither accidental nor an immediate choice; it was the culmination of an ambitious search following a high-profile artistic impasse.

The Precursor: Henry Moore’s Departure

Before the bronze sphere was installed, another modern master stood sentinel over the plaza. In the late 1960s, the celebrated British sculptor Henry Moore loaned his figurative bronze, The King and Queen, to Trinity College. Set against Paul Koralek’s 1967 Brutalist library, the loan aimed to spark a creative dialogue between humanistic modern sculpture and bush-hammered concrete.

The pairing, however, proved discordant to the sculptor:

  • Visual Competition: Moore felt the subtle, regal silhouettes of The King and Queen were compromised by the heavy concrete massing and prominent forecourt lanterns.
  • Light and Orientation: Facing north, the forecourt offered little direct sunlight. The perpetual shadow dulled the bronze patination and obscured the piece's delicate contours.

Concluding that the site compromised his creative vision, Moore requested the sculpture’s return. Trinity honoured his wishes, leaving an awkward spatial vacuum across one of the campus's most prominent public arenas.

Securing the Pomodoro Sphere

Determined to find an artwork that could command rather than succumb to the architecture, Trinity sought a piece with sufficient scale, mass, and surface dynamism to animate a hard-edged, shaded plaza.

The acquisition proved to be a natural convergence of interests. While the college searched internationally for a focal point of genuine stature, Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro was expanding his seminal series of ruptured spheres across high-profile architectural contexts—including the Vatican Museums and the United Nations Plaza in New York.

In 1982, Pomodoro generously gifted the primary bronze casting to Trinity College. Through combined funding from the university, Italian cultural institutions, and private benefactors, the necessary mounting infrastructure and logistical operations were assembled. When Sfera con Sfera was mounted on its low granite plinth in 1983, the forecourt found its ideal counterweight.

Deconstructing Sfera con Sfera

Born in 1926 in Morciano di Romagna, Pomodoro trained in goldsmithing and stage design before shifting toward monumental sculpture. This grounding in fine metal craft and spatial drama informs his hallmark practice: slicing into pristine geometric volumes—spheres, obelisks, and discs—to expose dense, labyrinthine mechanics within.

Sfera con Sfera relies on visual and philosophical tension:

  • The Mirror and the Rupture: The polished exterior suggests unbroken balance, technological perfection, and complete form. Where the shell tears open, jagged fissures reveal a secondary sphere composed of intermeshing gears, teeth, and rowed mechanical elements.
  • Internal Dynamics: Pomodoro described this impulse as an urge to "break these perfect, magic forms in order to reveal their internal ferment, mysterious and alive." The contrast mirrors human enterprise—a poised external façade counterbalanced by underlying friction, organic vulnerability, and systemic complexity.

Why the Site Works

Pomodoro’s sphere commands the forecourt precisely where Moore’s figurative piece struggled, resolving the plaza's visual challenges through three key dynamics:

  • Response to Light: Whereas Moore’s matte patina absorbed what little light reached the north-facing plaza and flattened the sculpture's volume, Pomodoro’s high-polish bronze actively gathers and bounces diffuse, overcast Dublin light to remain radiant year-round.
  • Architectural Scale: Moore’s elongated, delicate figures were visually overwhelmed by the looming mass of Paul Koralek’s concrete façade. Conversely, Pomodoro’s bold, self-contained geometry possesses the physical presence and visual density needed to hold its own against Brutalist forms.
  • Site Integration: While Moore found the forecourt lanterns and nearby structural elements distracting, Pomodoro’s convex mirror surface playfully reflects them. The sphere integrates the plaza's lamp standards, the shifting cloud cover, and Thomas Deane’s 1857 Venetian-Gothic Museum Building directly into the artwork's outer shell.

Rather than resisting the plaza's difficult conditions, Sfera con Sfera absorbs and reflects them, turning the surrounding environment into an active part of the composition.

Historical Note: The Eavan Boland Library

Completed in 1967 as the "New Library" to house Trinity College’s growing legal deposit collection, Paul Koralek’s landmark building was dedicated in 1978 as the Berkeley Library in honour of 18th-century philosopher and alumnus George Berkeley.

In April 2023, following student advocacy and an evidence-based investigation by the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group, the University Board voted to dename the library. The decision addressed historical records confirming Berkeley’s ownership of enslaved people on his Rhode Island plantation in the 1730s, alongside his published arguments supporting the enslavement of Indigenous and African populations. The university resolved that retaining the dedication directly contradicted its commitments to equality and inclusion.

Following a public consultation drawing over 800 submissions, the building was officially renamed the Eavan Boland Library in October 2024. Commemorating the celebrated Irish poet, essayist, and Trinity alumna (1944–2020), it represents the first building on Trinity's historic main campus dedicated to a woman.

Using The Leica Q3

Photographing high-polish, fractured bronze like Pomodoro’s Sfera con Sfera with the fixed 28mm f/1.7 Summilux on the Leica Q3 requires balancing specular highlights, complex internal shadows, and the wide-angle perspective.

1. Camera Settings & Exposure Strategy

  • Base ISO (ISO 50–100): Keep the Q3 at its base sensitivity to maximize the 60MP sensor's dynamic range. This latitude is essential for recovering details inside the dark inner cogs while taming hot reflections on the polished bronze shell.
  • Aperture Selection (f/4 to f/5.6): While the 28mm Summilux is renowned for its wide-open rendering at f/1.7, shooting between f/4 and f/5.6 delivers peak edge-to-edge resolution across the 60MP frame. It also broadens depth of field enough to keep both the reflective outer rim and the recessed mechanical teeth sharply defined.
  • Highlight-Weighted Metering: Specular glints off polished bronze can easily fool multi-field metering into blowing out highlights. Use Highlight-Weighted Metering (or apply -0.3 to -0.7 EV exposure compensation) to preserve the metallic surface detail. The Q3's DNG files have ample shadow recovery headroom to lift the interior crevices in post-processing.
  • Shutter Speed & Handheld Discipline: Maintain at least 1/60s to 1/125s. Even with the Q3's optical image stabilisation (OIS), micro-blur becomes visible when viewing 60-megapixel files at 100%.

2. Working with Light and Surface Reflections

  • Embrace Diffuse Overcast Skies: Bright, unbroken sunlight produces blinding pin-point specular highlights that blow out the bronze and leave the inner gears in near-black shadow. Soft, overcast conditions turn the entire sky into an enormous softbox, providing broad, smooth gradient reflections along the curved shell while gently illuminating the interior.
  • Manage Unwanted Reflections: A convex bronze mirror reflects everything in a 180-degree field of view—including the photographer.
  • Angle of Incidence: Step slightly off-centre to let your reflection blend into the deep shadows of the ruptured crevices rather than appearing in the middle of a mirror-polished facet.
  • Circular Polariser (CPL): While a polariser does not extinguish reflections on bare, conductive metals like bronze, it substantially cuts glare from ambient moisture, stone paving, and surrounding glass windows, deepening the rich amber tones of the patinated metal.

3. Composition & the 28mm Focal Length

  • Mind Wide-Angle Distortion: A 28mm lens exaggerates perspective close-up. If the sphere is placed too close to the edge of the frame, the optical volume will stretch into an unnatural oval. Keep the main spherical volume relatively central to maintain its true geometric proportions.

  • Contextual Grounding: Use the 28mm field of view to capture the dialogue between the sculpture and Paul Koralek’s Brutalist library facade. Shoot in landscape orientation from waist level, using the Q3's tiltable screen to align the horizontal lines of the library's board-marked concrete with the sphere's plinth.

  • Leica Digital Crop Modes: When isolating the intricate, gear-like interior, the 60MP sensor provides significant resolution flexibility:

  • 35mm Crop (~39 MP): Tighter environmental frame that excludes busy pedestrian traffic.

  • 50mm Crop (~20 MP): Ideal for zeroing in on the ruptured fissure, isolating the mechanical core without introducing wide-angle foreground distortion.

  • Macro Mode Engagement: For extreme detail shots of the patinated bronze teeth and chiselled internal markings, rotate the Summilux collar to Macro Mode (focusing down to 17 cm). Step down to f/4 to ensure the textural depth inside the rupture stays crisp.

Other Topics That May Be Of Interest

[[shortcode.limerick.0002]]

[[shortcode.newstreetwaterford.0002]]

THE LEGACY CATALOG

Examples Of Waterford Walls Murals

HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOGRAPHS PLUS MAP  
Leica Q3 
LET MISTER SCREEN DIRECT YOU 
GLOBAL INDEX OF PHOTO GALLERIES  
DEANSGRANGE CEMETERY
THE URBAN CARTOGRAPHER
MURALS BY SHANE SUTTON      
Pomodoro Sphere Within A Sphere At Trinity College Dublin - Presented By The  William Murphy - The Urban Cartographer

LET MISTER SCREEN ASSIST YOU 

GLOBAL INDEX