 A good deal of empirical work on the aesthetic, while not deriving from hostility to philosophical ideas, adopts a “bottom up” approach, focusing on the immediate reactions of untutored subjects to simple stimuli. We have seen that, by contrast, philosophical aesthetics is much concerned with normative issues of judgement and value, and with the claimed dependence of these things on training, knowledge and what is sometimes called “taste”, But these empirical studies are not philosophically irrelevant; we should not assume that the aesthetic responses of experts are discontinuous with those of naïve subjects (though for a discussion of the burden of proof here see Williamson 2011), nor that expert judgements are sensitive only to the factors that experts themselves endorse. It is important to ask whether there are baseline aesthetic responses, perhaps invariant across cultures, from which the great variety of aesthetic traditions emerge, and which may impose limits on those traditions and their products (for a defence of this “bottom up” approach to experiments in aesthetic see McManus 2011). Wölfflin, a founder of modern art history, had an interest in questions framed in this way: he claimed, for example, that there is a general tendency to prefer a rightward placement of a significant object within an image (1928). Subsequent research suggests a more complex picture, with preference dependent on physical and cultural factors: handedness, and whether one reads/writes left-to-right or right-to-left (see Palmer, Gardner, &amp; Wickens 2008 for references and discussion; Chahboun et al. 2017 found some limited support for the idea that placement preference depends on the subject’s direction of reading/writing). Other studies have shown robust preferences for certain colours (Palmer &amp; Schloss 2010), shapes, positioning of objects within a frame (Palmer, Gardner, &amp; Wickens 2008) and size (Linsen, Leyssen, Sammartino, &amp; Palmer 2011). These preferences often turn out to be ecologically driven; for example, people tend to like the colours of liked objects, with strong and culturally invariant liking of saturated blue and invariant hostility to colours associated with faeces and vomit. There are cultural variations; for example Japanese subjects appear to be unusual in their lack of enthusiasm for dark red (Palmer &amp; Schloss 2010). Some colour preferences are very culturally specific, as with the preferences of college students for colours associated with their schools (Schloss, Poggesi, &amp; Palmer 2011).