ABSTRACT
In an essay entitled Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art (1953), the art historian Ernst Gombrich commits the somewhat sacrilegious act of likening the aesthetic experience to the one type of enjoyment from which modern aesthetics (ever since Kant) had vehemently tried to separate it, namely to the sensuous and visceral pleasures provided by food and eating:
Botticelli’s Venus, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt, clearly have other dimensions of meaning and embody different values – but when we speak of the problem of correct balance between too much and too little we do well to remember cookery. For it is here that we learn first that too much of a good thing is repellent. Too much fat, too much sweetness, too much softness – all the qualities, that is, that have an immediate biological appeal – also produce these counter-reactions which originally serve as a warning signal to the human animal not to over-indulge [. . .] I mean that we also develop it as a defence mechanism against attempts to seduce us. We find repellent what offers too obvious, too childish, gratification. It invites regression and we do not feel secure enough to yield [. . .] The child is proverbially fond of sweets and toffees, and so is the primitive, with his Turkish delight and an amount of fat that turns a European stomach. We prefer something less obvious, less yielding. My guess is, for instance, that small children and unsophisticated grown-ups will be likely to enjoy a soft milk-chocolate, while townified highbrows will find it cloying and seek escape in the more bitter tang or in an admixture of coffee or, preferably, of crunchy nuts.
