The Zodiac Necklace

The Zodiac necklace is among Margot de Taxco's most ambitious designs: twelve linked panels, each rendering one zodiac sign in champlevé enamel on silver, joined into a single articulated chain.

Margot's design vocabulary draws explicitly on color and figure in a way that distances her work from the silver-forward output of Spratling, Aguilar, and the Castillos. She is considered among the most distinct voices of the Taxco school precisely because she chose enamel — a medium her peers largely avoided - and because her motifs (zodiacs, cosmological cycles, figures from Mexican folk tradition) tend toward the iconographic rather than the abstract.

The Zodiac necklace is one of the most-recognized objects in Margot's catalog. Scholarship on Mexican silver routinely cites the necklace as exemplary of Margot's enamel vocabulary. Well-preserved examples — with intact, unrepaired enamel across all twelve panels — are extremely rare, and the necklace has acquired the status of a defining work for any collection seeking to represent the breadth of the Taxco school.

The necklace dates from Margot's atelier on Calle de los Plateros, established 1948 after her separation from Antonio Castillo. The Margot workshop operated independently for three decades, and the Zodiac necklace is among the design objects most often used to define what Margot meant by 'silver with color' — an authored alternative to the prevailing silver vocabulary of her contemporaries.