Upper stele with hand for Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan (c. 600): Art, History and Details

Upper stele with hand for 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: Upper stele with hand for Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan
• Date: c. 600
• Culture: Southern Cambodia, Takeo Province, Phnom Da
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 104.8 x 69.2 x 10.8 cm (41 1/4 x 27 1/4 x 4 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Cambodian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1973.106.b

A detail from the museum

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

Collection credit

Gift from the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia

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.