Specification IP 20 220V-240V Bulb: LED 1 x MAX 6w (E 14)
Shipping & Returns
Made to order — about 6–8 weeks
This piece is produced to order by the maker. Production usually takes about 6–8 weeks, after which we despatch it from London.
Because it is built for you, cancellation is limited once production has started on a configuration you specified. Please check the timing before you order — and ask us if the date matters.
Michele De Lucchi had come out of the Memphis group; Giancarlo Fassina worked inside Artemide on the engineering of lamps. Tolomeo, the lamp the two of them drew together, reached the market in 1987.
Tolomeo hides its mechanism in plain sight. An articulated aluminium arm is held by an internal spring system, so the joints have no visible knuckle and the lamp can be moved with one hand and left exactly where it is put. The head swivels in every direction over a stamped aluminium reflector.
It grew into one of the largest families in modern lighting — desk, floor, wall, clamp and suspension, from micro to mega. Tolomeo Mini keeps the diffuser of the standard version and simply shortens the arms. Artemide has taken a Compasso d'Oro for it.
The same joint at two scales: the Mini on a desk, the Mega reaching across a room from a floor base.
Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina designed Tolomeo for Artemide in 1986. De Lucchi had come out of the Memphis group; Fassina worked inside Artemide on the engineering of lamps.
Tolomeo hides its mechanism in plain sight. The arm is balanced by cables and springs housed in the tubing, so the joint has no visible knuckle and the lamp can be moved with one finger and left where it is put.
The family grew into one of the largest in modern lighting — desk, floor, wall, clamp, suspension, micro and mega versions — and the lamp is in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Founded in Milan in 1960, Artemide shapes light around people — Tolomeo, Tizio and Eclisse among its classics.
Ernesto Gismondi founded Artemide in Milan in 1960. The catalogue reads as a history of post-war Italian lighting: Vico Magistretti's Eclisse, Richard Sapper's Tizio, and the Tolomeo drawn by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina.
The company works to a philosophy it calls The Human Light — light made for people rather than for its own effect. Design and production are run from Pregnana Milanese, just outside Milan.
