Shield Ring with Amethyst

The head of this ring is a domed circular shield, wider than the finger, built up as an openwork silver field and set with five square-cut amethysts. One stone sits at the centre in a bezel framed by twisted wire; four more, graduated in size, are set around it on the diagonal, so that the cluster reads as a cross laid over a disc. Between the bezels the silver is worked into small volutes and scrolls with applied beads at the junctions, and the openwork lets light in behind the stones rather than backing them solidly.

The shoulders swell into a broad shank, worked on both sides where it meets the head. The construction is fabricated rather than cast in a single piece: bezels, scrolls and beads were made separately and soldered onto the domed plate, which is the bench practice associated with the MATL workshop and the reason the stones sit at slightly different heights across the cluster.

Matilde Poulat introduced the MATL mark in 1934. Trained as a painter at the San Carlos Academy, she worked within the post-Revolutionary search for a Mexican aesthetic drawn from pre-Conquest and folk sources, and found particular inspiration in the Mixtec gold jewelry discovered at Monte Albán in 1932 (Morrill, p. 216). Her nephew Ricardo Salas perfected the carving of coral, turquoise and the other stones used across the workshop's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).

Date and attribution: the Date field previously read "1934-present," a workshop lifespan rather than a date for this object, and the note that stood here described the MATL idiom in general without describing the ring. No photograph of this ring's mark is held in the record, so the date is entered as unknown. Poulat died in 1960; work marked MATL from her own workshop is pre-1960, while post-1960 production under Salas carries MATL-Salas. The record should not assign this ring to either period until the stamp inside the shank is photographed and read.

Materials have been corrected to silver and amethyst; the field previously named the stone only.