Dove Mirror with Turquoise and Amethyst

A hand mirror in silver, set with turquoise, amethyst, and coral, carries the MATL workshop's full polychrome palette onto a decorative object, showing that the shop's manner extended well beyond jewelry. The colored stones and dense, baroque metalwork treat the mirror as another field for the workshop's signature ornament.

The MATL taller's output ran far past wearable pieces, Ricardo Salas recalled some three thousand types of jewelry and a hundred religious objects (Morrill, p. 216), and decorative items belonged to that range. The three set stones reflect the workshop's colored-stone craft, refined by Salas as he learned to carve coral, turquoise, and other materials (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).