Studies in Indian Art c7.s2.1

c7.s2.1

Whatever be the heights of metaphysical and moral thought attained by a people, the measure of their greatness is more truly reflected in those formal elements of culture which are comprehended in the term art. Art is primarily concerned with the cultivation of beauty through the physical medium. The physical object of art is only a symbol that evokes an experience, as it were, of an aesthetic shock, and thereby it connects us with the vast substratum of pleasure which in Indian aesthetics is called *Rasa*. The material world when properly transformed into terms of the beautiful leads to an experience of *Rasa*. An uncarved stone is only a rough primitive block, but it conceals within itself the potentiality of peerless beauty. The artist only makes that beauty manifest at a particular point and transforms the rough unhewn piece into a symbol that radiates joy and beauty. Man's worship of art consists in the creation around himself of numberless symbols and expressions of this kind which purport to manifest one or more aspects of the great storehouse of beauty that is in nature.