Ball and Crescent Earrings

These earrings get their effect from how little they use: a silver ball above, a semi-circular incised band floating below, and the air between them.

The incising is a workshop technique with its own name. Morrill records cincelar, engraving the silver with a hammer blow to a cincel, a tool whose differing edges produce different marks (Morrill, pdf p. 15). The lines on the band here are that craft, drawn by hand.

The earrings date to the First Design Period, 1931 to 1946, the years when the Las Delicias workshop was establishing the reduced, geometric vocabulary of Mexican modern silver.