Lamp of considerable volume. With a markedly uneven profile, the body provides a first highly developed area divided into eight sections of a convex profile, whose vertices are attached back to back to the many arms extended in lying S form composed of braces of silver plate, cut in profile, that hold the candlesticks. Smooth eight-part arched moldings gird, above and below, that form the ledge defining the upper edge of the plate and the lower stepping from which begin the arms. From here project two thick decreasing toruses separated by smooth steps (with the exception of the sign labeled with the dedicatory inscription), an intermediate tapering constriction, a lenticular body composed of a double dome split into two halves by a horizontal band coming out in the middle and a hemispherical piece adorned with scaled convex partitions that carry at its lower end a bulbous knob ending in a conical tip. On a compact background nuanced with points, the ornamentation, largely flat despite its mild relief, presents motifs of a mannerist lineage forming friezes of geometric and rhythmic arrangements, centered around mirrors that take different forms in each case: ovoid, circular, almond-shaped or heart-shaped, lance-shaped, between stems in volute, foliage and schematic acanthus leaves.
The upper pompadour takes the shape of a flared cupola which narrows in a tubular and tapered body crowned by another flattened sphere of double dome that serves as a base for the terminal cross. With v-shaped recess and undulating profile, the middle of the banner of the latter is engraved with the anagram of the corresponding invocation (MR foundries). Both the railing of the plate, as well as the edge of the bell, are fringed by molten and chiseled interlaced braces with original heads of bearded masks. Equal quality of fit is offered by the chain links, of two sizes, composed of "C"s in volute that describe in its interior, in the greater links, rhomboid spans with curved sides. Like other New Spain lamps, its type has dual functions, so that its votive nature and function as an oil lamp combine into a lighting piece like a chandelier or arm lamp. It has eight oil lamps or sockets for candles with cups that collect the burner plate, decorated identically to the body.
Although its long dedicatory inscription is not easy to read because of the fusion of letters and abbreviations, the interpretation fortunately provides enough information for classification and dating. The inscription states, according to the secular custom in these types of votive pieces, the name of the destination village church, the parish priest and the date. Thus it indicates that it was finished on September 20, 1737, the priest being the baccalaureate Simon de Urbieta. Offered to the image of Our Lady, probably under the patronage of the Virgin of the Rosary, as it appears in the anagram of the top banner, it belonged originally, as is also indicated at the beginning of the referred text, to the parish church of San Mateo del Mar, a town founded in 1606 on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, on the shores of the Pacific ocean. At the same time, this example is found to be related to another chandelier of the Franz Mayer Museum (Mexico), also from Oaxaca, labeled with a similar inscription on one of the outer gradations of the plate and with a similar text, indicating the day, month and year (1721), name of the parish priest and the town for which it was manufactured. Its caption states that it belonged to the seat of Tepeucila, a municipality in north-central Oaxaca. This however, is at odds with its label: a G between two columns stamped by a crown, interpreted as corresponding to the city of Guadalajara.[1] Thus, two locations (Oaxaca and Guadalajara), very far apart, coexist in the same work. In a private collection in Puebla de los Angeles we have found the same label on an incense brazier with the identical paradox, it simultaneously showing two different imprints of towns stamped in different parts of the piece: one with the initial G (in the brazier and the body of the smoke) and another with the letter O under a lion ing to the left (in the brazier and on the maniple, accompanied in the latter case by the seal of ownership of the cathedral of Oaxaca: a papal tiara on two crossed keys), alluding to the place name of the city of Antequera of Oaxaca. This forces us to ask the question, so far unanswered: was the label G used in some cases for marking pieces carved in Oaxaca?
The indisputable formal and stylistic relationships that can be established between the lamps that belonged to the churches of Tepeucila and San Mateo del Mar make lean toward Oaxaca as the source of the latter. Its manufacture, with certain popular taste and the persistence of mannerist language (based on mirrors, braces and convex partitions) denotes its origin from a local, isolated and peripheral center. Both pieces respond to a peculiar type of eight-part chandelier with arms-candle holders on the edges, whose main feature is the octagonal configuration and combination of polygonal and circular forms[2], formed by the multiplication and juxtaposition of moldings and bodies of convex, stepped, tapered or spheroid profile. The Ribadeo (Lugo) chalice and candlesticks confirm the predilection of Oaxacan silversmithing for these forms[3]. Made in a workshop of Oaxaca in the 1730s (in the same period), the latter ones show a similar solution in the head, burner plate of the polygonal along the edge of cresting relief of the interlaced C and S braces, on the convex, stepped and tapered bodies. Another feature of these lamps worked in Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz[4] is the location of the dedicatory inscription on a frieze on the outside of the plate, forming part of the decoration. Although the type is heir to the model coded in the different New Spain workshops from the previous century, basically composed of two convex areas with a concave constriction or intermediate tapering and cross with banner in the finish, a motif present for at least the last third of the seventeenth century, its morphology shows evolved and differentiating characteristics that have assumed here their own regional and specific forms, defined by repeated polygonal and very broken designs, the plates of large diameter which give its whole a flattened appearance, unlike the circular and more slender proportions of the capital models, and the tubular and tapered constrictions. Its completion date (1721 and 1737) reiterates, once again, the triumph of the polygonal shapes in New Spain in the second quarter of the eighteenth century[5].
Truly monumental in size, the Amparo Museum lamp s, therefore, its presumed hip with the little known silversmiths of southern Mexico, the interest of the originality of its design and the under-representation of similar pieces cataloged in which it has been possible to establish the same source.
[1]. Esteras Martin, 1992: page 159-161, nº 45.
[2]. The octagonal contour of the plate and the maniple matches that of another lamp belonging to the Franz Mayer Museum. Of more slender proportions, it has been cataloged as a work from an artistic center away from the capital around the years 1740-1750. Esteras Martin, 1992: pages 178-179, nº 53.
[3]. Cf. Kawamura, 2003: pages 308-10.
[4]. See, for example, the lamp that belonged to the people of Jalacingo, a Veracruz town located along the border of Puebla. Esteras Martin, 1992: pages 138-139-161, nº 35.
[5]. As evidenced by the custodians of Barasoain (Navarra) and Cumbres Mayores (Huelva), plants and polygonal shapes can be traced already in the Oaxacan silversmithing in the early eighteenth century. Cf. Heredia Moreno and Orbe Sivatte, 1992: pages 60-61, nº 17; and Heredia Moreno, 1980, I: page 297, fig. 336, and t. II, page 106; Palomero Paramo, 1992: pages 56-57, nº 2.
Sources:
Esteras Martin, Cristina, La plateria del Museo Franz Mayer. Obras escogidas. Siglos XVI-XIX, Mexico, Franz Mayer Museum, 1992.
Heredia Moreno y Asuncion, Maria del Carmen, and Mercedes de Orbe Sivatte, Arte Hispanoamericano en Navarra. Plata, pintura y escultura, Pamplona, Gobierno de Navarra, 1992.
Heredia Moreno, Maria del Carmen,La Orfebrería en la provincia de Huelva, Huelva, Diputacion de Huelva, 1980.
Kawamura, Yayoi, “Contribución sobre el conocimiento de la platería oaxaqueña”, Estudios de Plateria. San Eloy 2003, Murcia, Universidad de Murcia, 2003, pages 301-312.
Palomero Paramo, Jesus, Plata labrada de Indias. Los legados americanos a las iglesias de Huelva, Huelva, Patronato provincial de Huelva del Quinto Centenario, 1992.
