Cross Pendant with Amethyst, Coral, and Turquoise

A silver pendant shows the MATL workshop's ornamented manner at its most concentrated, the dense, baroque metalwork carrying the piece without the colored stones that often accompany it. The form distills the shop's signature surface to a single wearable focus.

That baroque repoussé was the workshop's defining trait from the start, distinctive enough that the young Castillos were said to have drawn on it during a brief time in the shop (Morrill, p. 83). The taller produced a vast range of jewelry, some three thousand types by Ricardo Salas's count, and silver pendants were part of that output (Morrill, p. 216).

Matilde Poulat introduced the "MATL" mark in 1934 as part of the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic rooted in folk and Pre-Conquest sources (Morrill, p. 216).