 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 sense of beauty arises from our projecting the feelings provoked by an external object into that object (Lipps 1903, see Currie 2011 for discussion). After a long period of neglect, these and related topics have reappeared under the banner “embodied cognition.” Freedberg and Gallese (2007) have drawn attention to the ways our bodies tend to reproduce the posture of a statue, to produce implicit or simulated movements that mirror those that seems to have produced a brush stroke or chisel mark, to resonate sympathetically with the pain of a represented figure. These, they say, are intrinsic aspects of aesthetic experience neglected by theorists who emphasise an intellectualist approach to art. They also claim that evidence for these effects based on introspective reports can now be supplemented by an empirically verified theory of brain processing that appeals to mirror and canonical neurons. Critics have alleged that this approach neglects the aesthetic impact of top-down factors (Kesner &amp; Horáček 2017) and that motor responses are absent in many encounters with art (Casati &amp; Pignocchi 2007: 410). Arguably though, Freedberg and Gallese seek only to identify an aesthetic factor of some significance and need not claim either exclusiveness or universality for it. Formalists in art might object even to this restricted claim, arguing that what Freedberg and Gallese have identified are obstructions to the sort of “purely optical” attention to pictures that Greenberg (1960) advocated (on which see Steinberg 1965; Currie 2007). But here again aesthetic prescription cannot afford to ignore empirical work: standards of aesthetic attention that no one has ever lived up to are not to be taken seriously.