“No other people on earth, Watson, has produced such intricate beauty in as small a space as the Valley of Kathmandu. One trenchant observer has described it best as a kind of coral reef, built up laboriously over the centuries by unrecorded artisans. As a human achievement, it ranks with the creations of Persia and Italy."

The earliest Buddhist art may be traced back to the Buddha’s life time, although some art historians suggest that it originated some centuries after the Buddha’s Great Parinirvana in the 6th century B.C.E. We find many exegetical references to strengthen evidences in the Sutra texts, i.e Vinaya and Tantra, including the Manjusrimulakalpa. It appears that the Buddha himself considered painting to be an important subject as he mentioned methods of painting in sutras, such as Buddha Pratimalaksana Sutra.This is apparently a very late Buddhist text, perhaps after 10th century C.E. These scriptures explain how to make the image of deities and spiritual figures.

With the recent discovery of the spectacular over life-size sculpture of King Jayavarma (dated 184 CE) and the existing stone sculptures of Mother Goddesses from the 2nd-3rd centuries, we can presume that the Kathmandu Valley was a thriving artistic center during the pre-Licchavi period. Certainly, by the Licchavi period (ca. 4th-9th centuries), Nepali craftsmen had developed distinctive stylistic and aesthetics conventions in both metal and stone sculptures, rivaling their Indian counterparts of the Gupta period. These masters—the Newar artists of the Kathmandu Valley—quickly achieved international repute throughout Asia, and were acclaimed as world-class painters and sculptors with unparalleled skill and iconographic expertise. The Transitional (ca. 9th-13th centuries) and Malla (1200–1768) periods were the most prolific and inspired eras of artistic production, with extensive cultural exchanges with the neighboring countries.