Thread by @DalrympleWill

Khmer portraiture

The Khmers raised their monarchs to the status of the the representatives of the Gods on earth and therefore found it easy to take the next step: depicting a God in the form of the monarch.

Jayavarman VII had himself depicted several times as Avalokitesvara/Lokeshvara

His Queen Indradevi was used as the  model for Prajnaparamita.

In the case of Jayavarman VII, the King is presented as a humble worshipper,  head lowered with eyes closed in deep and profound meditation. Yet the worshipper still has the powerful physique of a man trained for combat and his expression is full of charisma and strength.

Some art historians maintain that the faces looking down from the Bayon and Banteay Kdei are also based on images of Jayavarman VII as Lokeshvara.

Art historians also suspect that two particularly idiosyncratic portraits of the Devi are also probably modelled on real, living Khmer queens

A little later, the Cholas seem to have done the same with a bronze of Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi.

What I didn't know until yesterday, re-reading the Met catalogue of the  wonderful Lost Kingdoms exhibition, was that there also exists a possible portrait of the king often said to be the founder of the Angkor royal line, Jayavarman II.

In 802, two years after Charlemagne declared the Holy Roman Empire in St. Peters, on the remote hilltop of Phnom Kulen,  the young  Khmer Prince Jayavarman II was declared chakravartin of what would become the great Empire of Angkor.

The Prince had probably been a hostage in Java, where he may have seen the building of the Buddhist pyramid-stupa of Borobodur.

But Jayavarman II was no Buddhist. A passionate Hindu, around 770CE, aged around 20, he returned from exile, or possibly escaped, and  declared himself independent,rejecting the Buddhism of his enemies.

One of his first  actions, according to a 10thC inscription, was to perform a ceremony that “made it impossible for Java to  control holy Cambodia.” He then began a series of military campaigns & made alliances welding together disparate regions into some sort of  community.

Over a rule of 48 years, Jayavarman II conquered  all of the state henceforth called Cambodia, and declared himself supreme sovereign. This was marked in 802 by a ritual consecration on a pyramid at Mahendrapura on the mountain top of Phnom Kulen

The ceremony was performed by Hiranyadama, a Brahmin from India said in a later inscription to be "a scientist in magic science." It nullified all prior acts of vassalage and proclaimed Jayavarman as "world emperor."

I visited Phnom Kulen when I was in Cambodia and took a motorbike into the scrub to the site of his consecration, but didn't realise that there survived in the Guimet in Paris a possible likeness of the man found on the hilltop of Phnom Kulen where he was consecrated.

Art historians have long remarked on its portrait like qualities: the very particular physiognomy of this taught and muscular figure with his thin, serpentine moustache, full, sensuous lips and determined expression.

The only trouble with this theory is that the image, while from the Shaivite centre of Phnom Kulen/Mahendrapura takes the form of Lord Vishnu, and Jayavarman was a passionate follower of Lord Shiva. So the case remains unproven, but it remains  a most intriguing possibility.