That give them their context and deepens the meaning. The nine sentiments or states of mind, the nava rasa, are the base of esthetic experience which, even though it is one, is apparently expressed differentiated in the mass the light which, crossing a prism, seems to divide into rays of different colours.

The emotional process that determines the sentiment is described with notable insight, anticipating many acquisitions of the psycology of depths. In relation to more or less unforeseen changes of the external or internal surroundings, precise physical sensations are registered. These, in their turn, generate somatic and neurovegetative reactions of the emotions. If these persist the states of mind, that can change into a sentiments, or set up, psychic conscious phenomena due to factors cultural, moral, affective, intellectual order, that color the perceptions emotionally and influence the behaviour.

In this way the erotic emotion, shringara, generated the sentiment of love, rati; the comical one, hasya, hilarity, hasa; the pathetic one, karuna, leads to sorrow, shoka; the feeling of rage , raudra, is expressed in anger, krodha; the heroic one, vira, feeds the sentiment of courage, utsaha; the terrifiying perception, bhayanaka is coagulated into fear, bhaya; the repulsive sentiment, bhibatsa, generates repugnance, jugupsa; the marvellous dimension, adbhuta, is expressed in the sentiment of stupor, vismaya; and in the end the aura of quietness, shanta, difuses it self in the state of peace, shama.

The artist through his creation proposes to himself to evoke one or more emotions in such a way as to realize the esthetic enjoyment, the rasa. Such a term- used, as seen above, also for the sentiments- with its primary meaning of “juice, squeezing, quintessence” alude to a process of spiritual alchemy, where the universal essences of the human emotions are enjoyed and where artistic enjoyment becomes the saving intuition of eternal and perfect beauty, submitted to frailness and woldly imperfection. In that sense the artistic experience is similar to the mystic one and therefore is liberating.

The artistic, verbal, musical, formal language is elaborated and codified by tradition and is directed to contain the individualism of the artist and to furnish him with an instrument of choral comunication. The bond in certain rules that doesn’t suffocate the creative inspiration, that freely expreses itself in the reinterpretation of the well-known. Thanks to that the real artist – formed by long preparation, purified by selfish instances- and refined by phsycological introspection- awakens in the spectator the same emotion that inspired his creativity, through a process of resonance induces by implicit meanings of the work of art; in that way the ineffabile experience of the Rasa is realized.

Marilia Albanese