Pirelli Calendar 2026

“Elements.” This is the title of the new Pirelli calendar, captured through the cool yet deeply sensitive lens of Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø. This calendar is a reflection that transcends the contingency of glamour and follows the path of Western iconographic tradition. This collection of photographs is a visual essay of gnoseological nature on the persistence of the elements as cultural archetypes, engaging in an enduring dialogue with centuries of art history that made these elements the focus and the means for metaphysical meditation. 

Sundsbø transforms Fire, Water, Earth, and Air (in addition to a fifth element – Ether, the epitome of the sublime) from scenic backdrops into true avatars of identity. The subjects he portrays become tutelary deities of primordial forces, embodying an inner life that reveals itself through contact with the origin. Water is the quintessential symbol of sensuality, metamorphosis, and purification – “the origin and vehicle of all forms of life... the universal symbol of fertility and fecundity” (A. Cheerbrandt, Dictionary of Symbols).

Its resonance echoes from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, in which the goddess emerges from the waves as the embodiment of Beauty itself, to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851-1852), the emblem of romantic dissolution. In the new 2026 calendar, a mermaid-like Eva Herzigová reinterprets this archetype, channeling an unabashed sensuality into fluid force that adapts, persists, and projects the myth into an ever-contemporary context.

Fire, the element of passion, destruction, purification, is interpreted by Venus Williams, a goddess amid flames. In Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Allegory of Fire (1608), the narrative structure is a manifestation of a specific historical consciousness. In the painting, fire – the primordial element – and its uncontrollable nature have been harnessed and transformed into the substance of technology and, therefore, of civilization. The workshop is portrayed as a vast inventory of human inventions. 

Brueghel visually cataloged the crafted products: armor, scientific instruments, glassware, and domestic objects crowd the scene in a horror vacui that is anything but chaotic. Rather, it stands as a tangible manifestation of a new instrumental reason. This obsessive accumulation of artifacts unmistakably mirrors the rise of the Flemish merchant bourgeoisie, a class that measured its power and influence through the possession and transformation of matter. The painting, therefore, transcends anecdote to become a document of a social and economic reality.

The warm, reddish light that emanates from the forges does not serve as a tool to build an ideal perspective, but rather it sculpts every detail with lenticular precision, giving the objects an almost tactile presence, a commanding materiality. Space is not a neutral backdrop but a stage saturated with things, where the mythological figures of Venus and Vulcan appear nearly peripheral, absorbed – even subdued – by the supremacy of production itself.

The true focus of the painting is not the myth but rather the act of creating, the techne that bends nature to human advantage. From a broader perspective of art history seen as visual culture, Brueghel’s Allegory of Fire becomes the representation of a civilization that made ingenuity and labor its demiurgic force, presenting the world as an infinite workshop governed by the relentless logic of the object. When observing the tennis champion amid flames, her body is not a mere photographic subject but the very embodiment of primal energy, a force that both consumes and creates. She is a modern Vestal, a Venus of performance, whose power is not destructive but a vital and inexhaustible declaration. Fire becomes the very measure of her determination.

Earth is the element of materiality, stability, and the inescapable cycle of life. If Flemish art and Jan van Huysum’s still lifes celebrated earthly abundance and the vanitas of the transient things, Gustave Courbet and his robust, tactile landscapes showed the soil as the bedrock of reality. Tilda Swinton, portrayed as an androgynous woodland spirit surrounded by a miniature forest, embodies a Dryad who transcends the erosion of time yet welcomes it, reflecting a gravitas of geological depth.

Finally, Air or Wind appears as an allegory of the ethereal, the intangible, and ultimately of the spiritual freedom, just like the impalpable cloud that surrounds Italian actress Luisa Ranieri. The air that dissolves its form into light is the same found in J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), where landscape melts into atmospheric motion.

Ranieri’s portrait, with its sense of suspension and flowing drapery, establishes an ideal bridge to Symbolist exploration, a quest to express inner life beyond the bounds of physical form. It is an aerial, light, and fluid realm, mirroring the very fluidity of modern identity, which has an intangible, shifting, and elusive essence.

Altogether, this remarkably deep aesthetic vision resonates with the Platonic philosophy – the elements from which the Demiurge drew inspiration to create his visible forms. The 2026 Pirelli Calendar thus emerges as a cultural document that engages, with refined audacity, in a sophisticated dialogue with the history of ideas and images.

Opening image: Tilda Swinton fot the Pirelli 2026  Calendar