Fernando Ribaudo - OTTO MAGNUS VON GUERICKE - Il Figlio del Vuoto cm 50 x 50 Olio su tela Opera unica

I am Fernando Ribaudo, a 63-year-old Roman artist, a set designer for 42 years, and today devoted to my lifelong passion: painting. My grandfather frescoed churches in Sicily; my father created paintings for America.
A dreamer and a scholar. My painting is born where Caravaggio meets symbolism.


I study the ancient light of the masters of the seventeenth century to tell stories of dreams, fears, and modern allegories. I use oil on linen canvas, with glazes and chiaroscuro.
Every painting of mine is a theater. The protagonists are nudes, skulls, felines, and candles. I do not paint reality. I paint its secret.
The painting portrays the son of a German nobleman, scientist, and court alchemist.

Artist Fernando Ribaudo has been selected as a finalist for the 2026 Amedeo Modigliani International Prize, organized by the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation.

Otto von Guericke (1602–1686)—Scientist from Magdeburg, inventor of the vacuum, mayor, alchemist of the vacuum. Adviser to Emperor Leopold. He performed the most famous experiment of the 1600s: the Magdeburg hemispheres, which even 16 horses could not pull apart.

His son in the painting is his only heir, who does not want to become a politician; he wants to become a magician.

TITLE:

OTTO MAGNUS VON GUERICKE - The Son of the Void
Subtitle: The Heir of Magdeburg in the Tower on the Rhine, (1659–1720)

Technique and Style: Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 cm. Symbolic realism with German and Flemish Baroque roots.
The composition evokes the scientific vanitas of the imperial court. Northern chiaroscuro enters through the arched window. Seventeenth-century palette: lead white for the veil, vermilion for the damask, lapis lazuli for the blue sash.

Composition: At the center stands Otto Magnus von Guericke, son of Otto von Guericke, the most famous German scientist of the vacuum.
He is 22, blond like a northern Apollo, but tattooed like a sorcerer. The tattoos are not decoration. They are the Magdeburg hemispheres, the spirals of the vacuum, his father’s formulas for holding onto nothingness.
The white drape wrapped around him is his father’s shroud of the vacuum. He holds the cards of destiny in one hand. His other hand is open toward the sphere. His hair is stirred by the wind of the vacuum coming through the window.

On the table, his father’s language unfolds:

The crystal sphere with the eye inside: it is not magic. It is his father’s Magdeburg hemisphere, emptied of air. Inside is his eye, the German Augenspiegel. Seeing the vacuum in order to know.
The hourglass and the pocket watch with its chain: Tempus fugit. The time of the vacuum and mechanical time.
The skull on the book: Memento mori from the Magdeburg laboratory. Matter that dies when you take away its air.
The silver vase with the putti and the leather-bound books: the power of Magdeburg, his father’s treatises De Vacuo Spatio.
The coins and tarot cards: the game of fate, the Emperor’s gold that pays for the experiments.

All around, nature. A roaring jaguar, black panther, lynx, cat, rabbit, and lizard. They are the animals from his father’s cabinet of curiosities in Magdeburg. His father had placed them in a vacuum to see whether they could breathe in nothingness. He has set them free. They do not attack. They watch over the son of the void. They are the animal court typical of the iconography of power.
The arched window opens onto the Rhine, toward Magdeburg and the castle on the river.
It is a view in the German-Venetian school tradition, after Titian and Kircher, whom Otto von Guericke studied.
The painting within the painting: on the easel to the right, the nude Venus in a gold frame. It is matter laid bare, a tribute to Titian and the Venus of Urbino.
It is the art of the past.
The red velvet curtains separate the sacred laboratory from the profane, as in the anatomical theaters of Leipzig.
Otto Magnus does not predict. He opens.
He has inherited from his father the most dangerous invention of the 1600s: nothingness.
His father took the air from people’s lungs. He takes the air from destiny. It is the last night in his father’s tower in Magdeburg. Tomorrow he will leave his professorship and become an anarchist of the vacuum.