LUXURIOUS DOMESTIC WARE OF COLONIAL DAYS
Collectors, hunting all about the main traveled roads of South America, and especially up and down the west coast, have for many years acquired, amongst other treasures of colonial and precolonial days, plentiful examples of handwrought silverware.
This South American silver to-day adorns shelves and cupboards and curio tables; it is legitimately regarded as a collector's prize. Yet, not so long ago, the majority of these pieces were not regarded and were not used as ornaments or even as household treasures. They were the common domestic pots and pans, dishes and bowls and plates, ash trays, drinking cups and tankards of daily use in all the countries of Spanish America. Rarely will you find a piece of silverware of Spanish-American origin which was intended merely as an ornament. The little flower vases and bric-a-brac of to-day had no place in the home, while silver was in some regions considered as too commonplace to be used for the personal jewelry of aristocratic ladies.
Not that trouble was spared in the making and decoration of these household utensils. The time of the handicraftsman was of no account; he might spend long weeks and months on the fashioning of a pair of silver stirrups or a box for mate or other tea, or for many kinds of spices, adorning his work with beautiful and intricate sprays of upstanding flowers; richly wrought candlesticks of that spacious period frequently represent the skilled labor of months. But many a rich and politically important family of colonial days maintained their own silversmiths, family servants whose rank and value stood high. A metal worker was as much a necessity as the carpenter and baker. The expert worker of silver, gold, and jewels was intrusted with the creation as well as the repair of personal ornaments in addition to household plate, and the beauty and delicacy of some of the chains, brooches, and earrings made in Spanish-America between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries render such pieces the prize of the collector to-day.
The degree of wealth in precious metals of certain regions not infrequently brought about and established permanently their political importance. Thus the shining treasures of Mexico, in silver and gold, the rich ores and emeralds and pearls of "Cartagena de las Indias" (now Colombia), the gold and silver of Upper and Lower Peru, inevitably brought population and created markets, leading to the establishment of viceregal courts and all the panoply of civil and religious authority. Such cities as Cartagena, Panama, Mexico, and Lima were thronged, wealthy, full of movement; the great houses of the rich folk and officials were strong and self-supporting enough to stand a siege. These were of the "patio" type, built with thick stone walls; the eyes of the inhabitants turned inward to the central courts and gardens. A house of any pretensions would possess at least three patios, leading from each other and entered only from the first with its great main zaguan door. The living rooms of the family centered about the first patio; kitchens and rooms for domestics filled the next; stables, storehouses, the shops of the craftsmen would occupy the third. But in great establishments the patios would extend even farther, and the serving men, maids and cooks, the array of tailors, leatherworkers and wood and metal craftsmen, created something like a private village.
PRE-SPANISH METAL WORKERS
In metal working as in many other handicrafts the skilled Spaniard from overseas had something, but not everything, to teach to the "Indians," the native folk who were his assistants and pupils. For
long before the Spanish conquest brought the arts of Europe to the Americas there had existed old and masterly handicrafts, slowly developed by the sons of the soil. The soldiers who accompanied Cortes to Mexico have recorded their amazement at the beauty and intricacy of the ornaments fabricated by the Aztec craftsmen who wrought in gold and silver and whose shining wares were displayed in the great market places near old Tenochtitlan, the city in the lake that preceded modern Mexico City. The historian and captain, Bernal Diaz, has left a description of one of these markets in his "Conquest of New Spain".
Let us go on and speak of the skilled workmen Montezuma employed in every craft that was practiced among them. We will begin with lapidaries and workers in gold and silver and all the hollow work which even the great goldsmiths of Spain were forced to admire, and of these there were a great number of the best in a town named Atzcapotzalco, a league from Mexico. For working precious stones and chalchihuites, which are like emeralds, there were other great artists.
These workers in precious metals were so skilled that they could make little metal birds with movable wings, fish with movable scales, and delicate filigree ornaments made with fine wire. In such quantities were these produced that thousands were melted down by the conquering Spaniards in the early sixteenth century and made into chains for convenience in carrying. In fact, the melting pot has been for 400 years fed by these ancient ornaments, and there still remain considerable numbers.
If Mexico and Central America with their arts and crafts of the Maya and their pupils, the Aztecs, yielded great stores of treasure, of gold and silver ornaments made by native artists, still greater stores were seized when the rich lands below Panama came under Spanish control. The region that is now the Republic of Colombia was (and is) rich in gold, elaborated by the old Chibcha craftsmen into a wide range of fine ornaments worn by chiefs and nobles. South of Colombia stretches the vast tangle of afforested and mountainous country where nature has sown precious and useful minerals with a lavish hand, and where, in the huge silver hill of PotosI, was one of the world's great storehouses of this beautiful metal.
The moonlight sheen of silver, its soft and yet brilliant luster, and its many virtues as a metal, seem to have attracted the attention of the most simple-living as well as highly advanced tribes all over the world.
This metal in good qualities is second only to gold and has always been one of the first to be used and admired. It will tarnish, while gold retains its undimmed and imperishable beauty through every kind of vicissitude, but it is a sweet, clean metal which has always endeared itself to mankind. Not to speak of womankind, for what housewife lives who is not conscious of glowing pride when she surveys upon her dining table and sideboard fine silver of authentic purity and lovely luster? If her treasures are really old silver, most beautiful when it is worn, so much the better.
ANCIENT ORNAMENTS
The charm of silver had been realized in South America long before the conquest. The metal was reserved, with its high companion, gold, for private use. There was no trade value. Probably no one but rulers and great officials owned golden and silver ornaments, and the service of the gods certainly claimed great quantities. For instance, the great Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was radiant in the interior from the light reflected from golden plates covering the worked stones of the walls. There were moons of silver and suns of gold; and in one of the gardens of the Inca of Peru all the trees and flowers were wrought of silver and gold, cunningly made so that a light breeze moved the delicate leaves. And when Pizarro held the Inca Atahualpa to ransom, demanding that a certain room should be filled to the height of a man with gold, immense quantities of beautiful ornaments were piled in shining heaps in the hope, scandalously betrayed, of saving the semidivine Lord of Peru.
Farther south, where the never-conquered Araucanian folk retreated before, but continued to show a bold front to, the Spaniard, there was little gold; but silver was in such demand that no Araucanian girl who respected herself would lack necklaces and hair ornaments and a huge headed pin to fasten her shawl. Much of this silver doubtless came from what is now Bolivia, from the silver hill of Potosi, worked by the simplest processes. But Chile is rich in every kind of mineral, and silver and gold mines are scattered over the face of all the Andean folds and foothills. To-day the surface workings of silver in Chile are practically exhausted, though much wealth must lie beneath a cloak of verdure and in rocky hiding places; but in colonial times, and even into the years of independence, workings of both these precious metals were the source of many fortunes.
Finding thus, in the Americas, guilds of native craftsmen who had an ancient tradition of gold and silver working, the European newcomer in many regions had little to do except to place new patterns and models before the subjugated artist. The Spaniard needed plates and dishes for his table, so presently the South American metal worker, taught by alien masters, hammered out scores and hundreds of the delightful pieces still surviving in many regions. Peru and Bolivia yet contain many of these excellent examples; Colombia and Chile and Ecuador also, of course; Argentina and Paraguay, possessing no mines, gradually acquired precious metals by exchange. And, in spite of persistent destruction and scattering, a number of fine collections of beautiful pieces have been made; some have passed overseas to Spain and others to England and France. It may almost be said that South American beaten and worked silver is not understood in the great salesrooms of Europe; for while everyone knows to a shilling the value from year to year of a Queen Anne or Georgian specimen of silverware, a hammered dish of pure silver from Potosi may be "worth," according to the auction room, little more than its intrinsic value, simply because the market knows nothing about it. Such silverware carries no hall mark; no mark at all, frequently; and if there is an inscription of any kind it shows the name or initials of the owner. There was no question of falsification in colonial days; the point did not arise, for silver was the commonest metal. Alloys were not understood, and there was nothing with which silver could be readily alloyed by the craftsman. Nor was the art of silver plating known. But here at the door, almost to be had for the picking up, was silver, and therefore domestic utensils, as well as pieces of special equipment for man and horse, were wrought of this metal. Cooking pots, kitchen bowls, dishes, and serving plates and cups, as well as spoons and forks; stirrups, spurs, horse trappings; dainty ewers, washing basins, jugs for every sort of domestic purpose. From the silversmith's bench came an assortment of articles to fill the needs of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, boudoir, and stable. Silver was more readily accessible than tin or iron, could be easily obtained in regions where fine pottery and chinaware was an imported rarity, and it served a myriad of purposes.
Most of the objects, the "artefacts," which were fashioned from silver in the most glorious period of Spanish colonial times, can to-day be assigned, almost at a glance, to their specific purpose. But here and there the collector is able to display pieces which would baffle the uninformed. Most conspicuous and most numerous are the mates that were used in the south of South America, both east and west of the Andes, in the seventeenth, in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and, lingeringly, into the twentieth centuries.
The mate is a cup, a special cup, in which a certain herb native to South America, ilex brasiliensis, is infused. The infusion of this ilex leaf makes a kind of "tea," the origin of which dates back into the mists of history. In spite of careful investigation, sifting the evidence of 400 years and more, it is still not certain that the native folk ("Indians," as the Spaniards mistakenly called them) used the leaf of this ilex to make an infusiorrbefore the coming of the Spaniards.
Leaving aside this question of origins, it is clear that quite early in the history of the Spanish in South America the conquerors had begun to make an infusion of "yerba mate" as a household drink. The infusion was made first in a gourd, and then, as taste developed, in a gourd that was carved and mounted in silver. A bombilla, or perforated spoon for sucking up, and at the same time straining the infusion, was the next invention, and the succeeding stage is the finely designed and wrought mate whose outline still retained the shape of the gourd, but which was fashioned of silver, decorated with birds and flowers, which was furnished with silver feet, and which stood upon a silver stand or tray.
A collection of mates, with their transition from the plain gourd or horn to the elaborate cup with its filigree flowers, quivering upon slender silver springs, remains -one of the most interesting and characteristic representations of South American silverware. From plain utility to gracious ornament the step is gradual but logical; the progression shown in these cups is a tribute to the security of Spanish rule, to the wide liberty given to favored craftsmen, and to the loving care which such craftsmen lavished upon the work of their hands. Such work is not produced in this mechanical age.
The Spanish-American house of the sixteenth and seventeenth .centuries may have been jealously inclosed and guarded; but it was enriched and made lovely with carved furniture, with gilded and brightly colored leather work, with tiles and pottery and silks brought from the Orient; and throughout its spacious rooms there shone the moonlight gleam of silver mirrors, silver brasiers with their glow of hot charcoal, silver dishes on the dining table, reflected in the soft rays of candles held in silver sconces. More comfortable, modern methods, with the turning of an electric switch for light and warmth? I am not so sure. The age of silver had, too, its comforts, and added to comfort its charm and splendor.
If anyone devoted to twentieth century electric light, heating, and cooking should doubt the amenities of the sixteenth century, he has but to look carefully upon the photographs which illustrate this article in order to attain faith. These pictures [with one exception] have been specially taken for the Chilean Review, and these lustrous specimens of old silverware belong to the fine collection of South American silver work in the possession of George Rose-Innes, Esq. Here are dishes of noble proportions, whose sole decoration is the petal form of the outer edges and, sometimes, the finely wrought handles; here are stirrups and spurs and the single riding shoe which aristocratic ladies used when they traveled on horseback. Bowls for serving food at table–many showing double handles–are here, beautifully designed and ornamented; and here, too, are silver tankards and household cooking pots and tureens.
Silver censers, for burning perfume in rooms, are here, one lovely example being designed in the form of a turkey (a native South American bird, unknown to Europe before the Spanish conquest) with movable wings; birds, flowers, and fruit are seen as adornments of the remarkable series of mates in this collection, of which some are pictured complete with their bombillas. A photograph of a silver cupboard in the Rose-Innes collection also displays a number of personal ornaments used by the Araucanian Indian women, a separate photograph showing pendants and a few of the characteristic "topos" or shawl pins. There are other beautiful collections in this country, notably the remarkable and highly representative heirlooms in the possession of Lady (Claude) Mallet, but space forbids in the present pages a due reference to their extent and charm.
Source: Bulletin of the Pan American Union - March 1928
Trev.