Head of the Buddha, Bronze, Ayudhya, Thailand, 17th century.

The crowned head of the Buddha with round face, long lobed ears with lotus-bud earrings, small sharply-defined mouth and curved nose, wing-like eyebrows, lotus-petal eyes, with "whites" of mother of pearl and pupils of black composition. The head covered with a low crown ornamented with conventional floral-motives, with sockets for jewels. On the top of the skull was a triple ushnisha, of which two tiers are broken away, as is the back of the head. The surface is well patinated.

The crowned Buddha has been a recurrent theme in Thai sculpture since the Khmer-Lopburi type appeared in the mid-12th century. The figures are adorned in a simplified version of the 12th-century type but retain the richly decorated crown, with the skull protuberance (ushnisa), missing on this example, above. The Ayudha style appears to draw as much on the earlier Lopburi school as it does on its immediate predecessor, the Sukhothia school.

From E.J.Sebastian.

Ayudhya, Thailand

The Thai crowned and royally attired Buddha image, revived in Ayutthaya in the 16th century, was based on an earlier, 12th and 13th century type found at Lopburi and later at Sukhothai. The earlier models supplied the Khmer style fillet crown and the lotus bud earrings seen here.

IM.64-1927