Italian Murano Glass Vase Profeta Model by Renato Toso and Noti Massari

Italian designer and architect Renato Toso creates beautiful mid-century modern and modern pendant lights and sconces out of creamy Murano glass. His designs have a chic retro appeal characterized by soft curves and effortless elegance. He is part of the design firm Toso, Massari Associates, which he founded with his wife, designer Giovanna Noti Massari.

Toso was born in 1940 in Murano, Italy. Murano is a Venetian island with a long glassmaking tradition. Both Toso and Massari studied architecture in Venice and founded Toso, Massari Associati in 1966. The studio specializes in architecture and lighting design for interior and industrial spaces. 

Toso, Massari Associati has partnered with numerous companies over the years, including lighting company Leucos, which Toso and Massari participated in founding. The studio has designed collections for historic lighting manufacturer Vistosi, one of Murano’s most prominent glassmakers. In 2007, Toso, Massari Associati created a series of modular lamps called Ecos for the company. This series was followed up in 2013 by the Noon lamp collection, based on the moon’s phases.

The studio has won first place in several design competitions and shows, including the Venice Biennale, the Milan Triennial XII and the National Design Competition in Trieste. Its work has been exhibited at the Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

Today, Toso and Massari’s children — Anna, Marco, Pio and Tito —are all part of Toso, Massari Associati.

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Partnerships come and go within the community of glass-making artisans on the Venetian island of Murano, where business relationships seem as complex as the shifting alliances in the notoriously acrimonious Italian parliament. Formed in 1942 by members of families with centuries of experience in the craft, Barovier&Toso has proven to be one of the most enduring and prosperous Italian glass manufactories of recent decades. Under the nearly 50-year artistic directorship of cofounder Ercole Barovier (1889–1974), the company created buoyant traditional pieces such as chandeliers, sconces and other lighting fixtures, and it pioneered an array of innovative modernist glass designs with bold colors, patterns and surfaces.

The Barovier dynasty began in 1295, when Jacobello Barovier, mentioned in historical documents as a master glassblower, began pinching, cutting, blowing and twisting a molten mixture of sand and minerals into incandescent works of art. It remained entirely family-owned until the mid-20th century, when it merged with another glassworks to become Barovier&Toso.

To appeal to gentler, more conservative tastes, Barovier&Toso produced a range of lilting, sinuous lighting pieces that are often described as embodying “Liberty Style” — the Italian term for Art Nouveau, taken from the name of famed London department store Liberty Co., which promoted 19th-century organic textile designs and Arts and Crafts-style furniture in the manner of William Morris. The hallmarks of the style in Barovier&Toso works are elements of glass in the shape of thick leaves, fronds and flower petals, deployed along with other naturalistic ornament in sconces, pendants and chandeliers.

Ercole Barovier began his personal aesthetic transition toward modernism in the 1930s with his Primavera series of vases and animal sculptures — idiosyncratic milky-white and clear glass filled with tiny bubbles and hairline interior fissures that he produced for Artisti Barovier, a firm headed by his father and uncle. Later, with Barovier&Toso, he would explore such novel styles as the mosaic-like Pezzato glass; fluid Spiral patterns; the pebbly textured Barbarico line and the complex, layered and highly colored abstractions of the Oriente series of vases and bowls.

Traditional or modern, Barovier&Toso — still under family control — has produced one of the finest and most diverse catalogues of Murano glass in the last 100 years.

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