Cultural object
The Hindu deity Vishnu (Asian Art Museum)
The Hindu deity Vishnu is a Khmer sandstone sculpture of about 940 to 965 from the kingdom of Angkor, now in the Asian Art Museum.[1] It belongs to the Avery Brundage Collection.[1]
The object
The sculpture is a large and finely made image of Vishnu.[1] His crown, his four arms and the remains of the objects he held identify him.[1] The surviving right hand holds a round form that stands for the earth. The left hand rests on the handle of a club, a sign of might in battle, whose shaft has broken away.[1][2] The crown has been restored, and the museum has made a video reconstruction of the broken image.[2] The museum's catalog reference is B65S7.[1]
Iconography
The lost hands once held a war discus, linked with the sun, and a conch shell, linked with the waters of the world. Together the four objects showed Vishnu holding within himself the basic forces of nature.[2] In India and in Southeast Asian kingdoms such as Angkor, Vishnu and his incarnation Rama were linked with powerful and righteous kingship.[2]
Date and origin
The museum holds that an image of this size and quality was made in a royal workshop and set up in a temple supported by the court. Which temple is not known.[2] Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, whose kings ruled much of the region from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries.[3] About two centuries after this sculpture was made, at the height of the empire in the 12th century, a king who linked himself with Vishnu built Angkor Wat as a temple to the god. The museum calls it the world's largest temple to Vishnu.[2][3]