Crowned and bejeweled serpent-enthroned Buddha

The Buddha sits on the coils of a mythic serpent, but the separately cast serpent heads that would have arched behind the Buddha’s head have been lost. Originally this sculpture would have resembled the large stone serpent-protected Buddha nearby

The style of this figure, with its expressive face and dynamic hands, characterizes bronzes thought to come from Phimai in northeastern Thailand. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Phimai was an important town of the Angkor empire, and an influential center of esoteric (Tantric) Buddhism.