Born:1952 (Naples, Italy)

Italian artist Francesco Clemente makes a rare and exciting return to Rome this summer with his latest collection of sublime self-portraits. Galleria Lorcan O'Neill plays host to 32 jewel-like watercolors portraying the painter in various guises. The star of the show is 'Pantheon', a vast oil painting measuring an awe-inspiring 2.30 x 6.85 meters, his largest canvas to date.

This enormous tableau depicts soccer players, decked out in the strips of the country's arch rival football teams Lazio and Roma, being watched over by the gods. Bursting with energy and drama, 'Pantheon' marries modern social poetry with religious iconography in stirring dreamlike surrealism.

Clemente, a principal figure in Italy's Transvanguardia movement of the late 1970s, uses self-portraiture to explore and question his own reality. In this instance he plays the role of a football bursting through a goal in an inspired composition that symbolizes the enlightenment to which all religions beckon.