Scallop-Link Bracelet with Turquoise

This silver bracelet, set with turquoise and drawing on Aztec motifs, reflects the Pre-Conquest sources that lay at the heart of MATL design. After the Revolution, Mexican artists rejected European subjects in favor of the art of the Pre-Conquest Indians, and Matilde Poulat found particular inspiration in the Mixtec gold jewelry uncovered in 1932 at Monte Alban (Morrill, p. 216).

The worked silver and inlaid turquoise belong to a vocabulary developed in the taller after Poulat turned from painting, which she had studied at the San Carlos Academy, to silver. The result married ancient Mexican imagery to a hand-wrought modern object (Morrill, p. 216).

The turquoise reflects the stone-carving and setting the workshop was known for, skills Ricardo Salas perfected for the firm's jewelry (Morrill, p. 216).

Bracelets of this kind appear in our dataset only occasionally, and they show the indigenous-revival current of MATL work at its most explicit.