Luciano Vistosi (24 February 1931, Murano – 14 May 2010, Venice) was an Italian glass designer and sculptor closely associated with the post-war renaissance of Murano glass. Born in Venice and raised on the island of Murano, he grew up in his family’s glassworks, where he learned the craft from an early age and became fascinated by the possibilities of molten glass.

After his father’s death in 1952, Vistosi interrupted his studies and, together with his uncle Oreste and his brother Gino, founded the new Vetreria Vistosi. Their aim was to move beyond traditional tourist wares and create glass objects and lighting that reflected the most up-to-date developments in modern design.

As artistic director, Luciano pushed the company in a distinctly contemporary direction, designing many pieces himself and inviting leading architects and designers such as Vico Magistretti, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanuso and Gae Aulenti to collaborate.

Vistosi’s own work is marked by a constant search for “absolute” forms and an insistence on the primacy of material over drawing. Being left-handed, he often had to modify tools and working methods to suit his way of handling glass, which encouraged further experimentation. His lamps, vases and everyday objects from the 1950s to the 1970s combine technical sophistication with soft, sculptural lines.

Some of his designs were produced under the pseudonym Michael Red, a name that appears in period catalogues and on pieces such as the Nessa and Galia lamps for Vistosi.

From the late 1960s onward, Vistosi increasingly devoted himself to glass sculpture. His first solo exhibition, held in 1968 at the Galleria Alfieri in Venice, already revealed a mature sculptor with a very personal language. Subsequent solo shows followed in San Francisco, Venice, Cologne and Düsseldorf, and in the early 1980s the Ca’ Pesaro Museum of Modern Art in Venice dedicated a large retrospective to his work, followed by exhibitions in Madrid, Florence, Segovia and Milan.

While he is widely known among design collectors for lighting such as this Onfale table lamp for Artemide (designed in 1978 and still in production today), Vistosi’s later career was dominated by ambitious one-off sculptures in blown and carved glass, sometimes conceived on an architectural scale. In 1994 he created a monumental glass cross, composed of green, lagoon-coloured blocks supported on a bronze stele, for the crypt of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. He also developed visionary bridge projects in glass and took part in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial.

Despite serious illness in his later years, Luciano Vistosi continued to work in his Murano studio until shortly before his death in Venice in 2010. He often remarked that, although his family mostly talked about painting, the true “forms” were born every day in the furnace, and that he had always thought in three dimensions—an attitude that runs through both his lighting designs and his glass sculpture.