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A silverplate plate worked with the image of the Virgin Mary sits at the meeting point of devotional imagery and the decorative-arts production that filled the Los Castillo workshop, a maker known less for jewelry alone than for boxes, trays, and ornamental objects of every kind. The religious subject roots the piece in Mexican visual culture even as the form belongs to the tourist-era output of the taller.
The workshop was founded in 1939 when Antonio Castillo and his brothers left William Spratling's Las Delicias to set up on their own (Morrill, p. 166), and it grew into one of the principal large talleres of the Taxco School. Decorative hollowware and serving objects in silver and silverplate were a staple of that output.
Devotional pieces like this one are valued for the clarity of the figural work as much as for the maker's mark.
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