Neoclassicism

Anton Raphael Mengs

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

about 1777

Oil on canvas, 25 × 19 1/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Painted after the sitter's death and idealised: the scholar shown plain and direct, with no wig and no setting.

Look at

• The face and open shirt catch the light from the left against a plain olive ground.
• Warm brown drapery, white shirt and the pale book make a narrow, quiet range of colour.
• Smooth, blended handling on the face; broader strokes on the robe.

• Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) is counted a foundation of neoclassical thinking; Mengs belonged to his circle in Rome.
• The Greek letters on the book's edge spell ΙΛΙΑΣ: the Iliad.

Neoclassicism

the style, from about 1750 into the early nineteenth century, that took ancient Greek and Roman art as its model.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access · CC0 (Met Open Access)