3: Heroic Art HUtorians by SARAH SYMMONS. Lecturer In the History of Art at Essex.
In 1755 Johann Winckelmann , an obscure Dresden librarian who had never been to Greece or even Rome. provided the most challenging set of ideas for the artists of his time in his pamphlet Reflections concerning the Imitation of Grecian Artists in Painting and Sculpture; but his much more famous German contemporary, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , found plenty in it to criticise.