He met the influential early neoclassical painter Raphael Mengs ( 1728 – 1779 ), and through Mengs was introduced to the pathbreaking theories of art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann ( 1717 – 1768 ).

In 1768, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann was murdered by a robber in Trieste, while on his way from Vienna to Italy.

In the following century, it was not the admirers of Caravaggio who would have dismissed Carracci, but to a lesser extent than Bernini and Cortona, baroque art in general came under criticism from neoclassic critics such as Winckelmann and even later from the prudish John Ruskin.

Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by progressive circles in Sweden.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann ( December 9, 1717 – June 8, 1768 ) was a German art historian and archaeologist.

Called, " he prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology ", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art.

Winckelmann was born in poverty in Stendal, Margraviate of Brandenburg.

His father, Martin Winckelmann, was a cobbler, while his mother, Anna Maria Meyer, was the daughter of a weaver.

However, Winckelmann was no theologian ; he had become interested in Greek classics in his youth, but soon realized that the teachers in Halle could not satisfy his intellectual interests in this field.

From 1743 to 1748, he was the deputy headmaster of the gymnasium of Seehausen in the Altmark but Winckelmann felt that work with children was not his true calling.

" In the same year, Winckelmann was appointed secretary of Bünau's library at Nöthnitz, near Dresden.

The treasures there, nevertheless, awakened in Winckelmann an intense interest in art, which was deepened by his association with various artists, particularly the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser ( 1717 – 1799 ) -- Goethe's future friend and influence — who encouraged Winckelmann in his aesthetic studies.

It made Winckelmann famous, and was reprinted several times and soon translated into French.

Goethe concluded that Winckelmann was a pagan, but his conversion ultimately opened the doors of the papal library to him.

After their deaths, Winckelmann was hired as librarian in the house of Alessandro Cardinal Albani, who was forming his magnificent collection of antiquities in the villa at Porta Salaria.

The French painter Jacques-Louis David met Mengs in Rome ( 1775 – 80 ) and was introduced through him to the artistic theories of Winckelmann.

Winckelmann was buried in the churchyard of Trieste Cathedral.

The term eclectic was first used by Johann Joachim Winckelmann to characterize the art of the Carracci, who incorporated in their paintings elements from the Renaissance and classical traditions.

The pseudonym " Stendhal " of the French author Marie-Henri Beyle is generally supposed to be a homage to the German author Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was born in Stendal in 1717.

The notorious fake antique fresco of Jupiter and Ganymede, tailored to deceive Winckelmann has been attributed to Mengs or Giovanni CasanovaWith the aid of his new friend, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs ( 1728 – 79 ), with whom he first lived in Rome, Winckelmann devoted himself to the study of Roman antiquities and gradually acquired an unrivalled knowledge of ancient art.

In the historical portions of his writings, Winckelmann used not only the works of art he himself had studied but the scattered notices on the subject to be found in ancient writers ; and his wide knowledge and active imagination enabled him to offer many fruitful suggestions as to periods about which he had little direct information.

He and Johann Winckelmann studied ancient sculptures together, and Winckelmann advised the younger Wiedewelt, encouraging him to use these sculptures as a base for his drawings and to use his knowledge of ancient art as the basis for his artistic production.

Wiedewelt ’ s friendship and admiration for Winckelmann left a deep impression on him, especially in regards his acquired knowledge and appreciation for Ancient Greek artifacts and art.

The High Renaissance period is traditionally taken to begin in the 1490s, with Leonardo's fresco of the Last Supper in Milan and the death of Lorenzo de ' Medici in Florence, and to have ended in 1527 with the sacking of Rome by the troops of Charles V. This term was first used in German ( Hochrenaissance ) in the early nineteenth century, and has its origins in the " High Style " of painting and sculpture described by Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Winckelmann was a founder of scientific archaeology by first applying empirical categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the classical ( Greek and Roman ) history of art and architecture.

In German culture the first phase of philhellenism can be traced in the careers and writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the inventors of art history, Friedrich August Wolf, who inaugurated modern Homeric scholarship with his Prolegomena ( 1795 ) and the enlightened bureaucrat Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Philhellenism also created a renewed interest in the artistic movement of Neoclassicism, which idealized 5th-century Classical Greek art and architecture., very much at second hand, through the writings of the first generation of art historians, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

A fierce, but often very badly informed, dispute raged for decades over the relative merits of Greek and Roman art, with Winckelmann and his fellow Hellenists generally the winning side.

In 1751, the papal nuncio and Winckelmann's future employer, Alberico Archinto, visited Nöthnitz, and in 1754 Winckelmann joined the Roman Catholic Church.

The sculpture was known through the Roman marble replica found in Herculaneum and conserved in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, but, according to Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, early connoisseurs such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann passed it by in the royal Bourbon collection at Naples without notable comment.

The German aesthetic writers Johann Heinrich Müntz and Johann Joachim Winckelmann studied vase paintings.

Rococo frivolity and Baroque movement had been stripped away but many artists struggled to put anything in their place, and in the absence of ancient examples for history painting, other than the Greek vases used by Flaxman, Raphael tended to be used as a substitute model, as Winckelmann recommended.

His interest in classical Greece as in some respects a rational society can be attributed in some measure to the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, although Nietzsche departed from Winckelmann in many ways.

Winckelmann believed that art should aim at " noble simplicity and calm grandeur ", and praised the idealism of Greek art, in which he said we find: " not only nature at its most beautiful but also something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty, which, as an ancient interpreter of Plato teaches us, come from images created by the mind alone.

It is hard to recapture the radical and exciting nature of early neo-classical painting for contemporary audiences ; it now strikes even those writers favourably inclined to it as " insipid " and " almost entirely uninteresting to us "— some of Kenneth Clark's comments on Anton Raphael Mengs ' ambitious Parnassus at the Villa Albani, by the artist who his friend Winckelmann described as " the greatest artist of his own, and perhaps of later times ".

Winckelmann attended the Koellnische Gymnasium in Berlin and the school at Salzwedel, and in 1738, at age 21, went as a student of theology to the University of Halle.

With the intention of becoming a physician, in 1740 Winckelmann attended medical classes at Jena.

Winckelmann had read Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Xenophon, and Plato, but he found at Nöthnitz the works of such famous Enlightenment writers as Voltaire and Montesquieu.

Winckelmann stands at an early stage of the transformation of taste in the late 18th century.

* Winckelmann Institute at the Humboldt University in Berlin

* Johann Joachim Winckelmann at arthistoricum. net

His intimacy with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who constantly wrote at his dictation ( reference?