Word: jayavarman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...same authority could extend to portraits of historical figures--Khmer kings. Portrait is a relative term here. There is no knowing whether the last great Angkor king, Jayavarman VII, actually looked like the stone effigy made of him in the late 12th century, and it is most unlikely that he ever sat for its sculptor. (No social prestige attached to being a Khmer sculptor, and not a single artist's name in all the 1,000 years of Cambodian art has been recorded.) Which hardly matters, since the subject of this dense, exquisitely carved image is less a man than...
...Hindu, but the Bayon was built as a Buddhist shrine. While Angkor Wat soars, the Bayon suffocates. It is crowded with 54 sandstone towers, each with four carved visages of a complacently smiling future Buddha, or bodhisattva. The faces are probably likenesses of the temple's builder, King Jayavarman VII. The King, whose vigorous rule turned out to be the death rattle of the Angkor civilization, went on perhaps the greatest building spree of all Khmer kings, but the sandstone available by his time was of a much lower quality than that used at Angkor Wat. When first discovered...