  However, although human artistry may concentrate beauty more than nature does, that hardly means that artistic beauty is in all regards superior to natural beauty. Mendelssohn concludes the paragraph just cited by saying that “the most perfect, ideal beauty…is to be encountered nowhere in nature other than in the whole and is perhaps never fully to be attained in the works of art.” The beauty of nature as a whole exceeds the beauty of any work of art, and accordingly our admiration for the skill and genius of any human artist must be exceeded by our admiration for and pleasure in the artistry that lies behind nature as a whole.