Sensazione
Sensaazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
Health increasingly is viewed as comprising all facets of experience - it is accepted that a purely clinical approach has its limitations. Holistic approaches to health are not new. In the past there was a unanimity across centuries and cultures about health and holism.
Traditional Chinese medicine links health to energy and disease to interruptions in the flow of energy. Ancient Greek physicians viewed health as a condition of perfect body equilibrium and balanced 'humours' - categorised in European medieval times as blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile). North and South American Indians see health as a relationship involving human nature and the supernatural: being healthy is being in harmony with nature.
'Sensazione' is to do with being truly sentient.
Whilst for Leonardo vision was his primary 'window to the soul', he was also amongst other things, an accomplished musician. He valued refinement of all the senses. He wore exquisite sensual clothes, preferring silks and velvets. He prepared culinary feasts and always had flowers and perfumes in his studio and home.
Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Alternative and complementary therapies such as reflexology, aromatherapy, and meditation are based on the belief that enhancement of various senses can have a healing effect overall.
Comfortable, bright, attractively decorated places can influence mood and well being. The Ancient Greeks understood this. Asclepiades as early as c 150 BC considered music and baths as valuable treatments and insisted that the mentally ill should be treated in well-lit pleasant places.
