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Worked entirely in silver, this necklace shows the Matl workshop's ornamented manner standing on its own, without the colored stones that often accompany it. The dense, baroque silverwork, the foundation of the shop's style, carries the whole piece.
That baroque repoussé was the workshop's defining surface from its earliest years, distinctive enough that the young Castillo brothers were said to have drawn on it during a brief stint in the shop (Morrill, p. 83). The taller produced a vast range of jewelry, some three thousand types in all by Ricardo Salas's recollection, and silver necklaces were a steady part of that output (Morrill, p. 216).
Matilde Poulat introduced the "Matl" mark in 1934, a contraction touching the Nahuatl atl, the Aztec word for water, and her work belonged to the post-Revolution search for a Mexican aesthetic rooted in Pre-Conquest and pueblo sources (Morrill, p. 216).
Silver Matl necklaces are among the more frequently encountered forms, making them an accessible entry into the workshop's production.
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