Oval shaped piece in a silver plate nailed onto a wooden interior structure. Embossed and molded frame, with a stepped concave-convex profile, which in the intermediate spaces that mark the axes, has three overlays of metal plates, cut and embossed in the form of phytomorphic cartouches, composed of double opposing crests, with leaf and stem scrollwork in the late baroque style. The top end or cap is made up of an aureole of beveled bursting rays, separated by seven major rays and fourteen serrations embossed on the edges of the intermediate rays.
A light beam emerges from a circle of central clouds, presented as a medallion or shield, with angels in profile on each side. Its interior, cleared in the central and superior zones, contains in the lower part the symbols of the ion, with the rooster of the negation flanked by the three dice with which the clothes of Christ were wagered, as well as the three nails of the crucifixion.
Because of its religious symbolism, it could also have been a sacristy mirror or the framework of a devotional painting substituted later by the glass. The format of the frame, with overlays on a silver plate, connects the piece to another mirror frame owned by the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico, marked in the viceregal capital around 1770 by the senior assayer Diego Gonzalez de la Cueva (1).
Its fin-de-siècle style, whose design, in the form of an elliptical medallion surmounted by a beveled burst of light rays, preludes, roughly, the shape of another silver frame of this same collection, inducing us to propose a chronology in transit between the last moments of the baroque and the introduction of the neoclassical style.
- C. Esteras, La platería del Museo Franz Mayer…, op. cit., pp. 195-196, nº 62.
Oval shaped piece in a silver plate nailed onto a wooden interior structure. Embossed and molded frame, with a stepped concave-convex profile, which in the intermediate spaces that mark the axes, has three overlays of metal plates, cut and embossed in the form of phytomorphic cartouches, composed of double opposing crests, with leaf and stem scrollwork in the late baroque style. The top end or cap is made up of an aureole of beveled bursting rays, separated by seven major rays and fourteen serrations embossed on the edges of the intermediate rays.
