Cultural object
Lintel with Garuda
Lintel with Garuda is a Khmer sandstone lintel from Cambodia, carved between about 875 and 925 and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art.[1] It shows Garuda, the half-man, half-eagle mount of Vishnu.[1]
The object
The lintel measures 52.6 centimeters (20.7 inches) high, 118.1 centimeters (46.5 inches) wide and 17.8 centimeters (7 inches) deep.[1] The museum's catalog reference is 1967.37.[1]
Garuda has a beaklike nose, and his wings are carved as foliage, like the swirling leaves that grow from a stem arching across the middle of the panel. The plant forms give way to female figures and jewels and end in the heads of a cobra. Garuda is the natural enemy of serpents, so he holds their tails in check.[1] Two tiny female figures sit in the foliage below him; the one on the left is badly damaged.[1]
Style
The museum writes that the lintel is carved in the style of lintels made for a temple dedicated to the past kings of the Khmer lands. It describes the piece as a distinctively Khmer form of India's use of purifying, life-affirming imagery around doorways.[1]
Provenance
The New York dealer Robert Rousset sold the lintel to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1967 through the John L. Severance Fund.[2] It belongs to the museum's Department of Indian and Southeast Asian Art and its Cambodian Art collection, and the museum's record places it in gallery 243, Indian and Southeast Asian art.[2] The museum releases its photographs of the lintel under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, which lets anyone download, share and reuse them without asking permission.[2][3]
Exhibitions and publications
The Cleveland Museum of Art has shown the lintel in these exhibitions:[2]
- Year in Review: 1967 (November 29 to December 31, 1967)
- Reinstallation of "Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan" (October 12, 2024, to November 2, 2025)
The museum's bulletin reproduced it in its 1967 "Year in Review" and in Margaret F. Marcus's article "A Cambodian Sculptured Lintel" (1968), and the museum's handbooks of 1969 and 1978 reproduce it.[2]
See also
- Lintel with Visnu on Garuda, a tenth-century lintel in the National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh