eagle necklace

The eagle as a design subject for Los Castillo was never incidental. As Mexico's foundational emblem (the bird of the Aztec origin story) and, from roughly 1948 through the late 1960s, the literal stamp the Mexican government applied to certified export silver under the national silversmiths' syndicate (Morrill, Mexican Silver, 1994), the eagle image and the craft of sterling silversmithing were bound together in Taxco tradition. A necklace from this workshop centering that image asks to be read in both registers at once.

Los Castillo was established in 1939 when Antonio Castillo and his brothers and cousins stepped away from Spratling's Taller de las Delicias to found their own taller (Morrill 1996, p. 168). At its height the workshop employed some 350 artisans producing sterling jewelry at a scale unmatched in Taxco. Large necklaces in 925 silver appear in Morrill's catalogue from around 1940, and patriotic eagle imagery was a documented thread in the house's output: Morrill (1996, p. 174) records a Los Castillo "Eagle and Serpent, Symbol of Mexico" in silver with inlaid stone, dated to around 1955.

This example, firmly in the house's national-imagery vein, represents a workshop that understood the eagle not only as decorative motif but as the emblem of the very tradition within which it worked.