Gold and ruby pendant-brooch, Arnaldo Pomodoro, 1963

Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926) began his career as an architect and set designer before taking up jewelry design in the mid 1950s. The brooch offered here exhibits the contrast between a smooth, geometric gold plane and a striated surface, cast from sections of molds carved from the calcareous shell of the sepia, a cuttlefish found in the Mediterranean Sea. Pomodoro transforms negative space into a sculptural form that reveals the internal structure lying beneath the polished gold surface. Although Pomodoro later dedicated his artistic endeavors solely to sculpture, the fine detailing of his jewelry design continues to appear in his bronze monumental sculptures, which earned him a solo show in the 1964 Venice Biennale and permanent installations in New York, Washington D.C. and Milan. 

Another jewel designed by Arnaldo Pomodoro is in the permanent collection of the Schmuckmuseum, Pforzheim. See Fritz Falk and Cornelie Holzach, Modern Jewellery 1960-1998, p. 45,