THAILAND, LAN NA STYLE, 16TH CENTURY

The present work is stylistically associated with the kingdom of Lan Na, centered around the city of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. The Buddhist art of the Lan Na kingdom owed much to the art of the preceding kingdom of Sukhothai, which in the beginning of the fifteenth century began to be subsumed by the powerful Ayutthaya polity. Compare the present head with a bronze figure of Buddha, dated by inscription to 1500, illustrated by H. Woodward, Jr. in The Sacred Sculpture of Thailand, London, 1997, p. 208, fig. 203.