Krishna Reinstalled

After seven years in the conservation lab, in the special exhibition galleries, and on tour to the Smithsonian, the CMA’s celebrated 1,500-year-old Cambodian sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan is on view again in the museum’s west wing. During that period, the larger-than-life-size monolith that had been broken into multiple pieces was reconstructed with fragments sent from the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. A special exhibition in 2021 and 2022, Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain presented new research into its provenance and historical context in a cave temple on a sacred mountain in the Mekong River delta. The full story of the sculpture is detailed in Revealing Krishna: Essays on the History, Context, and Conservation of Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan from Phnom Da in the Cleveland Masterwork series, published by the museum in 2021.

To prepare gallery 243 for the sculpture’s return, staff from across the museum’s departments have been working behind the scenes to coordinate changes in the spaces, so the sculpture can be shown in the round. Previously, the figure was built into a wall and stood on leg sections that were recently identified as belonging to a different sculpture of Krishna in the National Museum of Cambodia. After an unprecedented exchange of sculptural components between 2015 and 2021, conservators, mount makers, and engineers created a sophisticated modular system for presenting the still-fragmentary sculpture using only the sculpture’s own pieces, without filler material. The posture, stance, and height of the figure have been calculated from measurements taken in the cave where the torso-and-head section was found in 1910 and from comparisons with related sculptures from the same site, using 3-D modeling technology.

Visitors to the new installation, which opens on October 12, 2024, can experience Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan as the centerpiece of the suite of Indian and Southeast Asian galleries in the museum’s west wing. The figure is mounted on a pedestal of the same dimensions as scholars believe it was when worshipped in its rupestrian shrine before the site was abandoned seven or eight centuries ago. Several sculptures are taken off view to accommodate the new presentation of the reconstructed Krishna, and 13 works from Cambodia, Indonesia, and India are added from storage to complement the new installation.