Let us analyze a little more closely this notion of the content. Music and architecture cannot properly be said to have any content, although they have a meaning according to their uses, like a funeral dirge and a hymn of joy, a prison and a temple. But this meaning is extraneous. It is given by the work itself only in so far as the form induces the emotion which belongs to the idea,--as the dirge, sadness; the temple, awe. The idea of burial or of worship is nowhere to be found in the work of art. In the hierarchy of arts, paining and sculpture show the first trace of a content. This content, however, is at once seen to be susceptible of farther analysis. The "Sistine Madonna" pictures a mother and child worshiped, which may be called the subject,--but this does not exhaust the content. The real meaning of the picture, to which may be given the name of THEME, is the divine element in maternal love. The subjects of Donatello's "John the Baptist" and "Saint George," of Michael Angelo's "David" and "Moses," can be described only as men of Different types in different attitudes; their themes, however, are moral ideas, expressing the moral significance of each personality. The subject of "The Angelus" is given in its name; its theme is humble piety. From the infinite number of possible examples one more will suffice,--the well-known "War" by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,--the subject a youth, under a lurid sky, trampling under his horse's feet the bodies of the slain. The theme is again a moral idea,--the horrors of war. If we now ask whether we can attribute beauty to the ideas of painting and sculpture, a negative answer is at once suggested. It is manifestly impossible to establish an order of aesthetic excellence between these subjects. The idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautiful than the idea of a ruthless destroyer only in so far as it is morally higher; and this distinction, therefore, has reference to the theme and not to the subject. How far, however, moral and aesthetic excellence are coincident is a question for which we are not yet ready. At this point we care only to point out that the mere idea of a picture is neither aesthetic nor the reverse.