Cutout Angel Bracelet with Ball Clusters

The bracelet organizes a small devotional image into a measured sequence of silver links. Each circular unit contains a cutout angel form, its body and wings simplified into rounded openings that read clearly at the scale of the wrist. The design depends on repetition rather than narrative. One angel follows another, separated and steadied by polished silver spheres that give the bracelet a beaded rhythm without interrupting the clarity of the pierced forms.

The object record notes that this design normally has a blackened lower layer, and that the dark surface has been removed from this example. That change alters the bracelet’s effect. Instead of the stronger shadow contrast that would have made each angel appear against a dark ground, the present surface creates a lighter, more continuous field of silver. The openings still define the figures, but the emphasis shifts toward reflection, outline, and the alternating pattern of round link, round bead, and curved negative space. At 7 1/2 inches long and 3/4 inch wide, the bracelet keeps its imagery intimate. It is not a broad cuff or a large pictorial jewel, but an articulated line whose meaning is carried through repetition and movement.

The marks place the bracelet within the mature period of Platería Victoria. It is stamped with the circular Victoria Taxco Mexico mark, Sterling, Eagle 12, and design number 53. Hougart records Eagle 12 for Ana María Núñez de Brilanti’s Victoria workshop, and documents the Sterling Victoria Mexico Taxco Eagle 12 marking sequence in the 1948 to 1958 period. That chronology is useful, but it should be read as a marking period rather than as proof of an exact year. The design number also matters because it locates The Angel within Victoria’s numbered workshop practice, where small objects of adornment were part of a disciplined design system rather than isolated novelties.

Ana Brilanti opened Platería Victoria in Taxco in 1940, and the workshop’s own period advertising emphasized designs by Ana Núñez de Brilanti, executed by artist silversmiths under her personal direction. This bracelet fits that model of authorship. Its interest lies not in virtuoso scale, but in the translation of a familiar angel into a modern silver pattern: flattened, repeated, pierced, and made flexible. In the broader Taxco School, religious and historical imagery could be carried into modern design without being copied literally. Here the angel becomes a compact graphic unit, softened by the rounded Victoria vocabulary and animated by the bracelet’s hinge-like spacing. The result is a useful record of Victoria’s range, showing how the workshop’s intelligence extended from its celebrated mixed-metal work to sterling jewelry whose structure, image, and surface were closely coordinated.