ABSTRACT
Vasili Kandinsky, in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, wrote, “Colour is the key. The eye the hammer. The soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that, by this or that key, makes the human soul vibrate properly” (Kandinsky, 1992). Art in its various forms is a gift of biological selection, which helps humans to better endure suffering. It is not a musician nor a painter nor a writer nor an art therapist who makes this statement but the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, known for his experimental work and dissemination of writings on the consciousness of self (Damasio, 2010). Thus, the artistic creation’s mechanisms of action and the symbolic function, complex and still poorly deciphered, are actively involved in maintaining our homeostasis, along with many other physiological functions. Damasio reminds us that they prevailed in biological evolution for their survival value (being deeply rooted in the human body), while contributing to the development of the welfare concept, “elevating humans to high peaks of thought and sensitivity,” becoming something like a “biological counterpart of a spiritual dimension in human affairs” (p. 442). The neuroscientist concludes that the arts have endured thanks to their therapeutic value, as a compensation or counterweight against human calamities and suffering.
