Feathered Serpent Bookmark

A silver bookmark stamped with a seal of the feathered serpent, this small object carries one of Spratling's enduring borrowings straight onto a useful thing. The piece dates to the third design period, 1951 to 1967.

The feathered serpent comes directly from the Pre-Columbian seals Spratling drew on from his earliest work, motifs he described as "sawed out of heavy sheet silver" to become brooches and ornaments (Morrill, p. 39). On a bookmark the seal becomes a finial-like terminal, the kind of small literary accessory the workshop made in its later years.

A minor object carrying a major motif, it shows how thoroughly the Pre-Columbian vocabulary ran through Spratling's range.