Tito Agnoli for O-Luce Table Lamp in Nickel-Plated Brass and Perspex

Tito Agnoli for O-luce, table lamp, model '269', nickel-plated brass, Perspex, Italy, 1959.

Italian designer Tito Agnoli designed this table lamp, model 269, in 1959 for O-Luce. This table lamp features a nickel-plated cylindrical brass base. A small metal shade holder is attached to the base aligned with its upper side. The shade is executed in dark green colored Perspex. Due to the green perspex, the light partition is softened and creates an eccentric color reflection. The use of perspex for lighting was quite new in the 1950s. Giuseppe Ostuni, the founder of O-Luce, was an enthusiast of technical innovation and believed in the potential of Perspex. As a material, it has a lower weight than glass, its unbreakable and most of all the simple formability is a great benefit. In 1954, Ostuni and Agnoli won the 'Segnalazione D'Onore' for the most innovative design at a design contest in Milan initiated by Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli. They won this price for the '441' perspex pendant designed by Agnoli.

Tito Agnoli (1931-2012), whose full name is Giovanni Battista Agnoli, is considered one of the most important Italian designers of modern lighting. Agnoli was born in 1931 in Lima, two years after his parents emigrated to Peru in 1929 due to the political situation in Italy where Mussolini's fascistic regime was on the rise. After WWII, Agnoli came to Milan in 1947 and started to take art lessons and enrolled into the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. The mid-century tendency in the art world, with surrealism and abstract expressionism thriving, didn't suit Agnoli's realism. A year later he began to study engineering and architecture at the Milan Polytechnic. During his career, Agnoli worked as an assistant for Gio Ponti and Carlo De Carli. From the fifties onwards, Tito Agnoli, who was still very young, created a series of ambitious creative design projects for O-Luce, Arflex, Poltrona Frau, Matteo Grassi, etc. He has been nominated for the Compasso d’Oro several times during his career. Nowadays, some of his designs are part of the permanent collection of the MoMA in New York.

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