The embodied responses identified by Freedberg and Gallese are obstructions to genuine aesthetic attention rather than components of it.

German aesthetics of the late nineteenth century was particularly focused on explaining human attraction to form in picturing, sculpture and building. Not always easy to interpret in detail, the broader themes of this work include the ways that our bodily and ecological situation determine the aesthetic preferences we have for such things as symmetry (Wölfflin 1886), how architectural form is appreciated in terms of its capacity to facilitate movement through space (Schmarsow 1894, and how a sen