Lucite, Cane and Brass Lantern, in the Manner of Gabriella Crespi and Christian Dior, Italian, circa 1970

Three materials — lucite, cane, and brass — are brought together in this tall Italian lantern (thirty centimetres across, ninety-eight in height) with the precise material intelligence that characterised Italian luxury design at its 1970s peak. The woven cane filters and warms the light, turning a bare bulb into a honeyed ambient glow; the lucite panels diffuse that light outward while lending a cool translucency to the overall form; and the brass fittings, crisply detailed, hold the composition together and add a note of metallic gleam. The result is a lantern of extraordinary material complexity achieved with apparently effortless elegance.

Gabriella Crespi (1922–2017) was a Milanese designer and artist who became one of the defining figures of Italian luxury decoration in the postwar decades. Working from her Milan studio, she developed a singular vocabulary based on the combination of natural materials — bamboo, rattan, cane — with brass and Plexiglas, creating objects of a richness that no single material could achieve alone. Her lanterns, tables, and lighting pieces were collected by figures including Yves Saint Laurent, and her work entered the most prestigious private collections of the period. Christian Dior Maison, the home furnishings branch of the couture house, worked in a closely related idiom during the same years, commissioning Italian craftsmen to produce lighting and decorative objects that combined natural weave, lucite, and metalwork for an international clientele of equivalent taste.

At ninety-eight centimetres in height, this is a lantern conceived as a major statement — a piece to anchor a console, to fill an architectural niche, or to mark the entrance to a grand room. Its tall, contained proportions give it a presence that goes well beyond purely functional lighting; it is, in the fullest sense, a sculptural object. An important example of the Italian material luxury of the 1970s, and a piece that would be equally at home in a dedicated collection of the period or in a contemporary interior that requires a strong and distinctive lighting accent.