Krishna's Butter Ball, Mahabalipuram (c. 1900s): Art, History and Details

Krishna's Butter Ball, Mahabalipuram (c. 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Unidentified Photographer.

The work and its context

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

Mahabalipuram is a site on India’s southeastern coast where numerous rock-cut temples and sculptures were carved during the early 600s. The site includes a remarkable, naturally occurring boulder that became known popularly as Krishna’s Butter Ball, thereby merging a geological phenomenon with sacred narrative. If baby Krishna could crawl while holding this monolith as effortlessly in his hand as a ball of butter, he must be a magnificently powerful god. Colonial-era tourists enjoy their excursion to the site with no indication that they recognized its sanctity. Photographs such as this would have been sent back to Britain for viewers to marvel at the landscape of India.

Object facts

• Title: Krishna's Butter Ball, Mahabalipuram
• Date: c. 1900s
• Creator attribution: Unidentified Photographer
• Culture: early 20th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: Gelatin silver print, toned, on collodion printing-out paper
• Dimensions: Image: 15.3 x 10.8 cm (6 x 4 1/4 in.); Paper: 15.3 x 10.8 cm (6 x 4 1/4 in.)
• Collection: PH - Misc. 20th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2019.68

A detail from the museum

It was popular during the early 1900s to tone silver gelatin photographs with gold to give them a warm glow.

Collection credit

Gift of Barbara Tannenbaum and Mark Soppeland

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.