Rectangular Scroll Earrings with Amethyst

These earrings translate the MATL workshop's dense silver scrollwork and square amethyst settings into a compact pendant format. Their darkened recesses, beaded borders, and layered silver surface give the pair the same ornamented presence that defines the workshop's larger necklaces and bracelets.

Colored-stone setting was central to the MATL workshop. Ricardo Salas, Poulat's nephew and collaborator, was singled out for perfecting the carving of turquoise, coral, and other stones used in the jewelry (Morrill, p. 216), and Salas later estimated that the workshop produced some three thousand jewelry types (Morrill, p. 216).

Matilde Poulat introduced the MATL mark in 1934 as part of the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic rooted in Pre-Conquest and pueblo sources (Morrill, p. 216). This pair belongs to that recognizable vocabulary: colored stones, worked silver, and a deliberately ornate Mexican idiom.