A higher standard
This is not only a lighter: it is an object of inheritance. Every CROWN & SERPENT piece is engraved by hand, face by face, with a burin and time.
Five engraved faces
Every CROWN & SERPENT piece is engraved on five surfaces: both flanks, the lid, the base and the back. None of them stays silent. The object is read by turning it in the hand, never at a single glance.
The Six Symbols
Six figures order everything we engrave: each piece is born from one of them, not from a catalogue of ornaments.
La Guadalupana
The mandorla of rays is the most demanding engraving in the workshop: dozens of radial lines that must open to the same depth so that the light runs evenly over the brass.
The Raven of Constantine
Bird and standard in a single figure. The body is engraved in short, crossed lines, so that the plumage changes tone with the angle at which the piece is held.
The Crown of Thorns
Crown, nails and wood reduced to the minimum. It is the most austere theme of the series and the one that tolerates error least: every stroke stays in view on the plain field.
The King of Death
A crowned skull, worked with a chisel so that the crown keeps its full brightness while the face sinks into shadow. A pocket memento mori.
Saint Michael the Archangel
The archangel and the serpent occupy the full face of the lighter. The wings call for a very fine shading, almost like sheet metal, so as not to darken the central figure.
The Knight Who Vanquished the Dragon
Rider, lance and coiled beast: the densest composition of the six. It closes the series because it gathers the engraving resources of all the previous ones.
The craft
The burin before the machine.
Every brass body is fixed in the engraver’s ball and receives the line by hand, burin after burin, following a drawing traced in grease pencil on the bare metal. The shading is born from hundreds of parallel cuts that the thumb guides and the eye corrects; no rotary tool intervenes.
Tools have weight. A well-tempered burin falls differently in the hand than a new one: the metal already knows where to go. In the workshop, every gouge and every chisel has its place and its name; nothing is improvised with anonymous tools on brass that took time.
The file and the chisel are not equivalent: the file smooths, the chisel names. Choosing the wrong tool on a detail line is losing the stroke that takes hours to redo. That is why the workshop keeps a surgical silence when the tip touches the metal.
Night work has another quality. With the light directed at the metal and everything else in shadow, the cuts speak clearly: what shines is right; what absorbs light asks for another pass. The night workshop teaches you to see with your fingertips.
Metal offers resistance. It is not hostility: it is dialogue. The hand proposes the line and the brass answers with the texture of its grain, with the hardness of the alloy, with the memory of how it was rolled. Every piece negotiates its own engraving.
A complete piece demands between sixteen and twenty hours of pure burin work, spread over several days so that the hand does not lose precision. There is no shortcut that preserves the quality of the stroke. Time is not a cost: it is the main material.
It is a craft inherited from armoury and liturgical silversmithing, where engraving served to name what had to last longer than its owner. Here it keeps that purpose: a pocket piece made to age, to be lit and to pass from hand to hand.
