The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

CEYLON
428
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AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
V
to-day northern Siam. By the thirteenth century
these invaders had so strongly established themselves
that they were able to expel the Khmers
and to found the first national Siamese dynasty
at Chiengmai (Chiengsen) in the northern
Menam Valley. The Buddhist art of this period
marks the first definite emergence of what
can accurately be described as a Siamese style
and ideal, although influenced to a certain
extent by Pala prototypes from Burma. The
Chiengmai Buddha type is distinguished by
the arched eyebrows, the exaggerated almond
eyes with a double-upward curve in
the lids,
the hooked sharp nose and rather small and
delicately modelled lips [360]. Bronze now
almost entirely supplants stone as a material
for sculpture.
In the last seven hundred years of Siamese
history it is possible, of course, to differentiate
among many different local schools and to trace
the gradual transformations in the stylistic evolution
of sculpture, but the aesthetic value of this
enormous amount of material is, most of it, so
insignificant that such an analysis need not
detain us.
The later history of sculpture in Siam is one
of decadence towards the evolution of the final
stereotyped Buddha image manufactured during
the Ayudhya Period. The statues made
during the Suk'ot'ai Period (thirteenth to fourteenth
centuries) are marked by a gradual
simplification of the formulas of the Khmer and
Chiengmai types. A particularly attractive head
in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, belongs to
this period of transition from a Khmer to a
purely Siamese expression [361]. In this head,
which is of stone covered with gold lacquer, the
shape of the brows and the mouth, sharply
defined by linear incision, is still suggestive of
the Khmer type, but the elongation of the face
and the appearance ofan indefinable sentimental
quality - a softness partially due to the gilt
applique - unmistakably mark the
evolution
towards the sculpture of the Ayudhya Period.