THAILAND, SUKHOTHAI PERIOD, 14TH CENTURY

This superb cast head of Buddha Shakyamuni shows him with a sublime inner calm. The deep spiritual feeling is enhanced by the natural patina of the bronze itself. It epitomizes the finest images of the Buddha produced in the Sukhothai kingdom of central Thailand during the fourteenth century. This style is characterised by an ovoid face with arched eyebrows that flows into the nose-bridge ending in a downward point, by snail-shaped curls and curled tips of the elongated earlobes. H.W. Woodward, Jr. discusses a similar example in The Sacred Sculpture of Thailand: The Alexander B. Griswold Collection: The Walters Art Gallery, London, 1997, no. 53. A seated Buddha from the Sukhothai period in the National Museum of Ayutthaya is published in J. Boisselier La sculpture en Thailande, Fribourg, 1987, pl. 92.