Lamp

1700-1800

Name(s) currently unknown

Mexico City, MEX, Museo Franz Mayer (current location)

This lamp, probably made to illuminate a church or chapel in New Spain, is made out of silver worked in a variety of ways—cast, embossed and chiseled.

The lamp would most likely have been hung from an interior roof beam or ceiling. It is covered with repeating floral and leaf designs pounded into the silver. The inverted cone of the base, made up of bulbous shapes, was popular at the beginning of the 18th century.

While it is not known who made this lamp or where it originally hung, the production of silver pieces like this one would have been carefully controlled. There were regulations that governed the silver-maker’s guild and tests that pieces underwent to document their purity of material.

Silver, abundant in Spanish America, was frequently used for church ornamentation, like lamps, candlesticks, chalices and monstrances.

The lamp is currently in the collection of the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City. The German-born Franz Mayer (1882-1975) was a prescient collector of colonial decorative arts and his personal collection, assembled in his home in Mexico City during his lifetime, forms the core of the present-day museum named for him.

Oil-burning lamps, like this one, added their glow to the darkened interiors of churches. Their shadowy light, so different from the bright outdoor sun, added to the otherworldly environment created within these sacred places.

Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Franz Mayer

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

El arte de la platería mexicana: 500 años. 1989. Mexico City: Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo.

The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the Museo Franz Mayer/ La grandeza del México virreinal: tesoros del Museo Franz Mayer. 2002. Houston. Texas and Mexico City: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Museo Franz Mayer.