position), but also with square or rectangular designs. Furthermore beaklike curved incisions, always in vertical position, representing the peaks of the hills or mountains are also shown together with other incisions. Such rocky hills are used in Nepalese art meaningfully, depicting the Kailasa Mountain inhabited by both Shiva’s family and the subjects of Kuvera, the king of the genies, and subterranean mountains carried by atlas-like yaksas, usually shown under the stone spout of the water fountains of the valley (fig. 23; cat. 1). They are also used to separate the scenes in narrative stone reliefs. The stylized rocky hills regularly appear both in early sculptures and in early medieval-period manuscript paintings in which the hills are shown in multiple colors, sometimes in paintings and other times in line drawings. Although they were seen as late as in fourteenth-century Buddhist painting of the valley, they eventually became obsolete after that century and were replaced by a totally different type of stylized rocky hill consisting of multilayers of overlapped triangular design with scalloped edges. A colorful representation of such a rocky hill is exemplified by the painting showing Avalokiteshvara’s legends (cat. 27).
before Hinduism and Buddhism were established. Even after many concepts were reinterpreted and presented in iconography in accordance with different religious beliefs, some original elements remained intact in the art and culture of the valley much more vividly than in India. The popular notion that seeing auspicious or inauspicious objects affects people’s lives is also part of monsoon culture. The mainstream art of South Asia is closely associated with this notion. In the tradition of the art created to assist an adept in achieving divine power through visualization, this notion, however, was considered irrelevant. The stylistic study of Nepalese art is the study of evolution. In a sense, artistic style developed like language and literature. With attention paid to the first appearance of new artistic features, we can endeavor to detect the artistic elements derived from a root in its own tradition or from another artistic tradition and their step-by-step development. Like poets, talented artists used these elements elegantly in their visual expressions.
Conclusion Conceptually Newar art is the visual expression of the monsoon culture, which flourished from the southern slope of the Himalayas to the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent long
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