Black Marble Shrinathji Wall Panel, 36 in

The svarupa of Shrinathji is worshipped at Nathdwara in Rajasthan's Mewar country, where the Pushtimarg sampradaya founded by Vallabhacharya has kept the image since the late seventeenth century. The original is a relief — the form rises out of a single block of dark stone rather than standing free of it — which is why a wall panel, not a free-standing murti, is the most faithful way to render Shrinathji at this scale. The black marble here is the dense Indian stone quarried in the Markapur belt of Andhra Pradesh: even in tone, close in grain, and one of the few stones that will hold a true mirror polish without filler. Carving a relief runs the opposite way to carving a murti in the round. The sculptors we work with begin from a squared slab, sink the plain arched field and the stepped border first, then bring the figure forward in stages — blocking the mass of the torso and the raised arm, cutting the mukut, the gunja mala and the folds at the waist last and shallowest. The face, the fingers of the raised hand and the beading of the mala are finished entirely by hand. Polishing is progressive, and the field behind the figure is taken slightly further than the figure itself so the svarupa reads bright against it. Every element of the posture is fixed by tradition, and a Pushtimarg household will check it before anything else. The left arm is raised aloft, the cupped hand at the height of the arch — the gesture of lifting Govardhan to shelter the cowherds of Vraja from the rains. The right hand is a closed fist at the waist with the thumb turned out. Both feet stand flat and frontal. The body is that of a child of about seven, with the rounded face and soft cheeks that belong to the svarupa and not to an adult Krishna. Seen from the front, the raised arm falls on the viewer's right and the fist on the viewer's left. At 36 inches this is the largest panel in the collection, and it wants height above it — a double-storey entrance hall, a stairwell landing, the courtyard-facing wall of a haveli. Grazing light does the work: a concealed wall-wash raking in from one side gives the relief its depth, where flat frontal light collapses it. Leave a clear metre of plain wall around the panel so the arch has room to read. Fixing is on concealed anchors into the wall behind, and at this weight the wall wants to be masonry rather than a stud partition. We can take the same panel down to 18 or 24 inches for a pooja room, change the border profile from stepped to plain, or move it into Makrana white marble if the wall behind it is dark. Send us the wall dimensions and a photograph of the space and we will work the proportions out with you before anything is cut.