O
From this we may explain the quite peculiar interest in natural beauty, not
insofar as it is beauty as such, but insofar as it is specifically natural beauty.
Whence it is self-evident what we are to think of the imitation of nature as a
principle of art; for so far from the merely contingent beauty of nature providing
the rule to art, the fact is, rather, that what art creates in its perfection is the
principle and norm for the judgement of natural beauty.
F.W.J. Schelling
