Radiating Line Earrings

Deep incised lines radiate from a central silver bead in these earrings, the carved rays turning a simple disc into a small sunburst.

The incising is a named workshop technique, cincelar, marking the silver with a hammer blow to a cincel whose edge shapes each line (Morrill, pdf p. 15). The central bead was formed by hand, wire melted into a ball (Morrill, p. 36), so that both the radiating lines and the bead come from the silversmith's own handwork.

Earrings of this reduced, geometric design belong to the modern vocabulary the Las Delicias workshop made its own.