Ravasco's coppette occupy a particularly distinctive place within his work and they are a medium he returned to for over a decade. Rather than treating hardstone as a passive support for precious decoration, he allowed the colour, markings and irregularities of the material to determine the character of the object, adding jewels with remarkable restraint.

The approach was already well established by the mid-1920s. Contemporary photographs published in Architettura e Arti Decorative in 1926 show Ravasco's vessels in jade, onyx and rock crystal inhabited by serpents, peacocks, sirens, coral and pearls. The accompanying text praised his return to the traditions of Italian goldsmithing through human and animal forms and motifs drawn from leaves, flowers and fruit, describing him as one of the few true Italian successes in Paris.

Here, however, Ravasco comes unusually close to the geometric language of the end of the decade. The natural abstraction of the agate culminated in the centre of its base with a banded pool of the same blueish greys as the sapphires glinting above it, whilst its stepped base is pulled into the design with a further four cabochon sapphires accents, evoking corners that its oval does not have. Geometry disciplines the composition without overwhelming it.

It is characteristic of Ravasco's particular response to modernism. He neither resisted its new vocabulary nor submitted entirely to its austerity. Instead, geometry and abstraction were absorbed into an artistic language that remained emphatically his own: colourful, precious, imaginative and rooted in the Italian decorative tradition.