The essence of the visual arts is to show what things look like. The visual arts can also offer designs or illustrations of ideas, but those are not the main thing. Picasso’s “Guernica” shows the anguish of a gored bull and viewers read about it to learn that the painting was about the Spanish Civil War. The commentary, not the picture, told the viewer that. Lenze’s “Crossing of the Delaware” commemorates an important event in American history and so convey’s patriotism, but what the viewer sees is all these people jumbled together in a boat and wondering whether the boat will capsize. More important as for the aesthetics of the visual arts is that each of the major genres of the visual arts find the particular subject matter whereby what is to be shown. Still lifes show arrangements of articles so that the juxtaposition is quaint of vases and fruit or even rotten fruit so as to gather the experience of having all of those experiences put together for their textures or shapes or the different kinds of those things, some ceramic, some organic, some sleek, some mottled. Portraits, for another example of the genres of the visual arts, show faces for whatever it means for people to interpret what is to be made of faces, how faces reveal or cover up minds. You may look at Rembrandt’s “ The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” as a presentation of how important people are meeting with one another, and so a record or a commemoration of that event, but the primary thing to notice is the faces, what particular people look like and how they are different and the same as people’s other faces.