Aztec Warrior Box with Metales Casados and Stone Mosaic, Design No. 931

The lid of this rectangular box carries the whole of its design: a standing Aztec warrior in profile, worked in warm gold-toned metal against a mosaic field of blue stone. The figure wears a feathered headdress and carries a shield and a bundle of darts, and behind him a broad scrolled serpent form fills the upper and lower registers. Silver is used selectively — headdress bands, shield boss, dart shafts — so that three metals read against one another across a single plane.

The construction is metales casados, the Los Castillo technique in which pieces of contrasting metal are cut and fitted like a jigsaw and joined with little or no solder, credited in the sources to Jorge "Chato" Castillo. Here it is combined with stone mosaic: the ground is laid up from irregular tesserae, flecked and veined, set flush with the metal. The box has a silver-mounted rim and a stepped silver base, and the interior is lined and divided in rosewood.

The blue stone is not identified. It reads as lapis lazuli or a similar blue mineral in the photographs, but the record should not name it without a gemmological opinion, so Materials records it as an unidentified blue stone rather than leaving "blue stone" to stand as though it were a determination.

Design No. 931 is entered as a structured field. Los Castillo was founded in Taxco in 1939, and metales casados combined with stone mosaic at this scale belongs to the workshop's mature decorative-object production rather than to its first years; but no date-bearing element has been read from the mark, so the Date field records the date as unknown rather than carrying a workshop range.