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A serpent's head modeled in silver, this button distills one of Spratling's recurring pre-Columbian subjects into a small functional object. The serpent carried real weight in Mexico's ancient imagery, and Spratling typically stylized the creature so that the pattern of its form, rather than literal representation, carried the design (Morrill, p. 73).
The button compresses that idea to its essentials: a single modeled head, legible and sculptural at small scale. Spratling also produced a version of this design for Silson to execute in silver plate, so the serpent head existed beyond his own workshop's silver production.
The button is recorded in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. Figural serpent-head pieces of this kind come to market only occasionally.
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