Pair of Walnut Table Lamps, Helmeted Soldier Faces, Italian Work, circa 1970

This remarkable pair of table lamps takes as its subject matter the face of a helmeted soldier — a form that, in its fusion of the human and the martial, has animated Western decorative art from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond. Each lamp is carved in walnut, the warm honey-brown grain of the wood giving the helmeted visages a quality that oscillates between the archaic and the timeless: these are faces that could belong to a Roman legionary, a condottiere of the quattrocento, or the anonymous warrior of a classical frieze. The grain of the walnut, worked along the contours of the face, lends each figure an organic vitality that cold stone or bronze could not achieve.

Italy’s tradition of wood sculpture — from the polychrome figures of the medieval workshops to the sophisticated intarsia of the Renaissance studiolo — made the carved and turned wood lamp a natural idiom for Italian artisan studios of the postwar decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of Italian craft designers revived the tradition of figured woodwork as a medium for luxury objects, producing lamps, furniture, and decorative pieces that combined the authority of Renaissance craft with the wit and formal boldness of the contemporary interior. Workshops in Tuscany, the Veneto, and Lombardy supplied the international luxury market with wood objects of remarkable invention, many in the form of anthropomorphic sculptures that doubled as functional lighting. These lamps belong to this distinguished tradition.

Presented as a pair, these lamps possess an inherent theatricality: flanking a console, a fireplace, or a monumental headboard, the two helmeted faces confront the viewer with a sculptural authority that no purely abstract lamp could achieve. The warmth of walnut ensures they sit comfortably in both traditional and contemporary interiors, while the martial subject matter adds a note of seriousness and historical depth. At 87 centimetres tall they are imposing presences on any surface, and their figurative character makes them equally persuasive as display objects in their own right, whether lit or unlit.