Gino Sarfatti for Arteluce Sputnik Chandelier

It is fitting that Gino Sarfatti (1912–85) had his sights set on the skies for his ornate and influential Sputnik chandelier. The Venice-born designer and industrialist had been pursuing an aeronautics degree at the University of Genoa when his father encountered financial troubles and relocated the family to Milan, where Sarfatti inadvertently created his first lighting fixture.

After he built a lamp for a friend using a glass vase and a coffee machine’s electrical components, Sarfatti soon became enamored with lighting design. In 1939, opened his Arteluce workshop, followed by a retail space. Working closely with local artisans, he gained valuable technical knowledge and developed hundreds of provocative, pioneering lighting projects that, given economic conditions in pre– and post–World War II Italy, were originally dependent on a cobbling of limited resources. The Sputnik chandelier — artful but constructed from few materials — owes its design to the skills that Sarfatti had honed on the job.

Nickname aside, the ceiling fixture that Sarfatti called Fuoco d'artificio (Italian for “fireworks”) was designed in 1939, nearly 20 years before the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit. The chandelier wasn’t actually manufactured until the early 1950s — ahead of the satellite's liftoff, mysteriously — but the design was a snug fit for the era's futurist architecture and Pierre Cardin’s flashy vinyl apparel. In the furniture world, the debut of Eero Aarnio’s pod-like Ball chair was imminent, and the space-age frenzy had engulfed popular culture, technology and politics.

In its awe-inspiring arrangement of jutting tubular brass arms and exposed pear-shaped bulbs (some models feature more than 20), Sarfatti’s light was an appropriate addition to the quirky space-age furnishings that had become fashionable in the 1950s. While the designer pursued function and utilitarianism, he was prone to the kind of experimentation that yielded his famous chandelier.

The Sputnik uses suspension cables and metal reflectors in lieu of the parchment lampshades that were commonplace during the early days of Arteluce. In 1973, following collaborations with Franco Albini, Marco Zanuso and others over the years, Sarfatti sold his award-winning company to lighting manufacturer FLOS, while his son, Riccardo, cofounded Luceplan in 1979.

The lighting maker Arteluce was one of the companies at the heart of the creative explosion in postwar Italian design. The firm’s founder and guiding spirit, Gino Sarfatti (1912–85), was an incessant technical and stylistic innovator who almost single-handedly reinvented the chandelier as a modernist lighting form. 

Sarfatti attended the University of Genoa to study aeronautical engineering but was forced to drop out when his father’s company went out of business. His mechanical instincts led him to turn his attention to lighting design — and he founded Arteluce as a small workshop in Milan in 1939. Sarfatti’s father was a Jew, so the family fled to Switzerland in 1943, but after the war — largely thanks to Sarfatti’s insistence on efficiency of design and manufacture — Arteluce quickly established itself as a top firm. Though Sarfatti continued as chief designer through the 1950s and ’60s, he also enlisted other designers such as Franco Albini and Massimo Vignelli to contribute work. Sarfatti sold Arteluce to FLOS — a rival Italian lighting maker — in 1973 and retired to pursue a more traditional avocation: collecting and dealing rare postage stamps. 

Sarfatti is regarded by many collectors as a pioneer of minimalist design. He pared down his lighting works to their essentials, focusing on practical aspects such as flexibility of use. His most famous light, the 2097 chandelier, is a brilliant example of reductive modernist design, featuring a central cylinder from which branches numerous supporting fixtures extending like spokes on a wheel. Similarly, his 566 table lamp is a simple canister, able to be raised or lowered on a stem, holding a half-chrome bulb. Despite the marked functionality of his designs, Sarfatti did have a sprightly side: His 534 table lamp, with its cluster of rounded enameled shades, resembles a vase full of flowers, the Sputnik chandelier (model 2003) was inspired by fireworks and the brightly colored plastic disks of the 2072 chandelier look like lollipops. No matter the style, Sarfatti concentrated first and foremost on the character of light created — and any Arteluce lamp is a modernist masterpiece.