Page 24 - Bonhams March 22 2022 Indian and Himalayan Art NYC

Some scholars consider the Cleveland Tara to have been painted around 1260 by Aniko (1245-
1306), a legendary Nepalese artist who is remembered as the greatest of his generation
(Kossak & Casey Singer, Sacred Visions, 1998, pp.144-6). Aniko was one of the Newari
masters invited to Tibet in 1260 by the Sakya hierarch Phags-pa (1235-80) to construct a
memorial stupa to Sakya Pandita (1182-1251). The Mongol emperor Khubilai Khan (1215-94)
later summoned him to the Chinese court, where he achieved great prominence as the highest
artisan-official of the Yuan dynasty. Aniko was described in the court annals as a prolific artist
who constructed various temples and created numerous bronze sculptures, paintings, and
textiles. Erected in 2002, a statue of Aniko now stands in the Miaoying Temple, Beijing (fig.3).
Encouraged by the presumption that some of his works must have survived (and, if so, they
must sit among the highest echelons of quality in the corpus of surviving painting and sculpture
from the second half of the 13th century), scholars have considered the attribution of his name
to several artworks. None enjoy a unanimous consensus; however, the Cleveland Tara has the
broadest acceptance of an attribution to Aniko. Considering its close stylistic similarity with the
Henss Tara, and that it can be convincingly argued that neither is surpassed in terms of overall
quality within their respective mediums, an eventual attribution to Aniko for the Henss Tara may
also be appropriate.

Fig.3
Statue of Aniko
Erected in 2002,
Miaoying Temple,
Beijing.

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