Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan (c. 600): Art, History and Details

Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan (c. 600) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This masterwork of early Cambodian sculpture shows the Hindu god Krishna effortlessly holding aloft a mountain to protect his fellow villagers and herds from torrential storms sent by a jealous old god. It is one of eight monumental monolithic figures recovered from a two-peaked mountain in the floodplains of the Mekong River delta, on the outskirts of the ancient urban center of Angkor Borei.

Object facts

• Title: Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan
• Date: c. 600
• Culture: Southern Cambodia, Takeo Province, Phnom Da
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 203.1 x 68 x 55.5 cm (79 15/16 x 26 3/4 x 21 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Cambodian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1973.106

A detail from the museum

Gold earrings were once fastened to the sculpture using holes in the figure's earlobes.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sotheby Mak van Waay B.V., Amsterdam. Collection Léonce Rosenberg, Paris, deuxième et dernière partie, Vente Publique. Le Mardi 1 Juin 1920. Lot 214.
• Groslier, George. Arts et archéologie Khmers: Revue des recherches sur les arts, les monuments et l'ethnographie du Cambodge depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours. 2, 2. Paris: Sté des éd. géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1924.
• Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. History of Indian and Indonesian Art. New York: E Weyhe, 1927.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.