Cultural object
Vishnu (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1942.563)
Vishnu is a Cambodian sandstone sculpture of the god Vishnu, dated 650 to 700 and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art.[1] He wears a high, flat-topped crown that the museum links to statues made at the site of Prasat Andet.[1]
The object
The statue measures 49.9 centimeters (19 5/8 inches) in overall height.[2] The crown is high and shaped like a miter, with a flat top.[1] Traces of four arms are visible. They run parallel from the shoulders and split apart at the elbows.[1] The eyes are sensitively rendered and the figure has a slight smile, two traits the museum calls characteristic of Cambodian sculpture. The museum also notes that, during this early period, the body shows some relatively naturalistic modeling of the muscles and garments.[1]
Vishnu wears a sampot, the Southeast Asian lower garment, with an upper garment tied loosely around it.[1] The museum's accession number is 1942.563.[2]
Iconography
In the museum's reading, the crown gives Vishnu the look of royalty, and the four arms show that he is a god, above any king on earth.[1] Vishnu comes into the world in avatars, among them Krishna and the boar Varaha. The statue shows him in his iconic form, as Vishnu himself.[1]
In Khmer art Vishnu usually has one face and four arms; a few standing statues have eight.[3] Four-armed Vishnu statues generally hold attributes such as a conch, disc, club and ball, which, Ven Sophorn writes, represent the elements of the cosmos: water, fire, wind and earth.[3] A standing four-armed Vishnu of the 7th century, in the Sambor Prei Kuk style and from Kampong Thom province, is shown in gallery A of the Angkor National Museum in the bulletin's October 2016 issue.[3]
In the southern Khmer lands, the Vaishnava tradition (the worship of Vishnu), which tied the god to cosmic kingship and to managing water, was prominent in pre-Angkorian times.[4] Piphal Heng and Paul A. Lavy write that two kinds of evidence reveal a Vaishnava orientation on the coasts of southern Cambodia and southern Vietnam in the 6th and 7th centuries.[4] One is the artistic tradition of four-armed Vishnu statues wearing miters.[4] The other, which they call the most spectacular, is the large stone figures from Phnom Da showing Vishnu and his avatars.[4] Phnom Da lies close to Angkor Borei.[4] By the early 7th century, the center of pre-Angkorian political power had moved inland to Ishanapura, at Sambor Prei Kuk, as another god, Shiva, rose in importance in Khmer culture.[4]
Date and origin
The museum dates the statue to 650 to 700 and gives its culture as Cambodia.[2] Its record cites an article by Howard Hollis, "Two Pre-Khmer Statues of Vishnu," in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art of December 1942 (volume 29, number 10, pages 164 to 166), which mentions the statue on page 164 and reproduces it on page 171.[2]
Prasat Andet, the site the museum names for this type of crown, is a temple where a statue of Harihara, the god who combines Vishnu and Shiva, was found.[1][3] Harihara usually has one head, and Vishnu's half of it wears a miter.[3] From the number of Harihara statues found at temples such as Prasat Andet, Sok Keosovannara wrote that Harihara seems to have grown more popular and widely worshipped at the end of the 7th and the start of the 8th century.[3]
Provenance
The museum's record lists the Neumann Collection in Saigon, Indo-China, with no date. Hernán Larraín Peró (1899 to 1994) of Buenos Aires, Argentina, sold the statue to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the museum accessioned it on June 8, 1942, through the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund.[2] As of October 2026, the museum notes that its information on the object, including its provenance, may not be currently accurate.[1]
Display
The museum showed the statue in its Reinstallation of "Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan", from October 12, 2024, to November 2, 2025.[2] In October 2026 the museum listed it in gallery 243, for Indian and Southeast Asian art.[1] Under the museum's Open Access Initiative, the work may be copied, changed and shared without asking permission, and the record marks it CC0.[1][2]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Cleveland Museum of Art, Vishnu (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Cleveland Museum of Art, Vishnu, Open Access record 1942.563 (May 29, 2026)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Angkor National Museum, Angkor National Museum Bulletin, volume 8 (October 2016)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Angkor Database, Piphal Heng and Paul A. Lavy, Pre-Angkorian cities: Ishanapura and Mahendraparvata (undated)