Aztec Butterfly Brooch

A butterfly drawn from Aztec design, this handsome early brooch sits at the heart of Spratling's First Period program of translating pre-Columbian forms into modern silver. He described those years as producing work "almost literally" copied from Aztec and Colonial motives, the ancient image flattened and stylized into a graphic silver form (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994, p. 156).

That the design was desirable enough to copy is part of its history: after the silversmith Artemio Navarette left the Spratling taller in 1936, he produced a version of this butterfly and signed it with his own initials, AN. The episode reflects how widely Spratling's early designs circulated and were imitated within Taxco.

Early Aztec-motif pins of this kind, tied to the workshop's foundational vocabulary, come to market only occasionally.