Artemide Tizio

The Tizio is a desk lamp of black arms and counterweights. From a small cylindrical base rises a short upright, and on it pivots a long two-part arm, balanced at each joint by a weight, so that the slim head at its tip stays wherever it is left. There are no wires on the arms. The current reaches the bulb through the arms themselves, joined by press-studs, from a transformer hidden in the base.

The lamp began, Artemide says, in 1970, in a conversation between its founder, Ernesto Gismondi, and the designer Richard Sapper, sailing friends, about a light that would fall exactly where the hand was working. Sapper settled the balance with jam jars of water, adding and pouring off until the arms floated. Artemide put the lamp into production in 1972. Its low-voltage halogen bulb was, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the first used outside the car industry.

Gismondi named it Tizio, from the Italian phrase for Tom, Dick and Harry, perhaps hoping to appeal to everyone, perhaps hoping that Caio and Sempronio would follow. They never did, but the lamp won a gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1974 and was selected for the Compasso d'Oro in 1979. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York keep one in their collections; the Met lists it as nylon, polycarbonate and aluminium, weighing about 3.5 kilograms.

Artemide has changed very little. A glass cover and a thin wire with a red bead were added to the head in the 1990s, smaller versions joined the full-size lamp, and in 2008 a separate LED model appeared. The original is still made in black, and since 2022 again in white. As Gismondi put it, the company did not change the Tizio because that is simply the way it is.