This statue of Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan is a masterpiece of Khmer sculpture. Made circa the year 600, it was brought to Marseille in 1910 by a young French sailor who wanted to exchange it for a motorcycle. After being sent to Paris, it eventually went up in Belgium and ended up at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But the story is more complicated than that: there were two statues and the other one went to the National Museum of Cambodia — and parts of the two statues were exchanged by in an extensive restoration process, related in this book: https://shop.clevelandart.org/collections/exhibitions/products/revealing-krishna.
I photographed the statue two years ago at a dazzling exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art.
