Founded in 1946 by Gianni Bruno Mazzega, A.V. Mazzega is still a leading source of contemporary lighting, offering diverse types and styles of floor, ceiling, and table lamps and installations. While many glassworks on Murano offer lamps and chandeliers in addition to table wares and decorative objects, Mazzega has consistently focused on creating high-quality specialty lighting that it has made available worldwide. Since the introduction of the electric light bulb into homes at the turn of the 20th century, the quality of light, and how it is experienced, has been modulated with the use of shades in diverse materials and colors. For ceiling lights, translucent glass has always, and naturally, been the material of choice. Carlo Nason was born and raised on Murano, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of Mazzega’s most recognized lighting designers. His ceiling and table lamps explore transparency through the use of multiple layers of transparent and translucent glass. His lighting designs emphasize the characteristic bubble-based shape of blown glass. In this lamp, light softens the edges of the multiple layers of opaline glass, giving the fixture a floating, ghostly appearance. Nason was one of the designers featured in the Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition “Glass 1959: A Special Exhibition of Contemporary Glass.” His sophisticated bowling pin–shaped vases and bowls, with their soft, matte black exteriors enclosing bright opaque yellow and turquoise interiors, represented a new direction in Italian glass design of the late 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the mold-blown and hot-worked bubble forms of Nason’s vases explored the shaping of glass by heat and gravity. Nason confirmed by e-mail that the hanging lamp is his design. For more information, see Alberto Bassi, Italian Lighting Design, 1945–2000, London: Phaidon, 2004; and Axel von Saldern and others, Glass 1959: A Special Exhibition of International Contemporary Glass, Corning: The Corning Museum of Glass, 1959, pp. 214–215.