Black Marble Shrinathji Murti with Carved Crown and Ornaments, 24 in

Nathdwara's Shrinathji is a black-stone swaroop, and this 24-inch murti keeps to that convention. It is cut from black marble — the deep, near-opaque stone quarried around Markapur in Andhra Pradesh and also imported from Vietnam — and brought up to a mirror polish so the carved ornament reads as light rather than as line. Against an ivory altar the figure holds its silhouette from across the room: the left arm raised aloft, the right hand closed in a fist at the waist, the two flat frontal feet that make a Shrinathji darshan recognisable to anyone who has stood in the haveli at Nathdwara. The murti is carved for you by the master sculptors we work with in Jaipur — artist families who have shaped devotional stone for generations. Work moves from the rough block to the primary mass, then to the shringar: the mukut with its sarpech crest-jewel, the kalgi plume above it, the layered necklaces and the long gunja mala that falls past the waist. Face, fingers and ornament are finished by hand at every stage, and the polish is taken up through progressive grades until the black turns reflective. We design the piece with you, brief the sculptor, and follow it through to the day it reaches your door. Shrinathji is Krishna at about seven years of age, shown in the moment he raised Govardhan hill: left arm lifted, right hand a fist at the waist. The swaroop has been worshipped at Nathdwara in Rajasthan since the late seventeenth century, when the image was brought from Braj, and the Pushtimarg tradition there dresses the deity in fresh shringar for each darshan of the day. This murti inverts that rhythm — the mukut, sarpech, kalgi, necklaces, gunja mala and the diamond mark beneath the lower lip are all cut into the stone, so the ornament is never added or taken away. At 24 inches the murti reads as the principal image of a home mandir rather than a shelf piece. Allow roughly a 30-inch opening and a clear foot of depth on the altar so the raised arm and the carved backing aureole are not crowded. Black stone wants light: a single warm downlight, or a skylight falling from above and to the left, will pick up the polish and keep the carved shringar legible instead of flattening it into a silhouette. The base is a plain stepped plinth, so it sits directly on a marble or wooden altar shelf without a separate stand. The same swaroop can be made shorter for a compact niche or taller for a pooja room that can carry it, and the shringar can be simplified to a plain mukut if you prefer a quieter darshan. Send us your altar dimensions on WhatsApp and we will work back from there.