  Winckelmann’s premises underlie his history of ancient art, the main claims of which are already evident in his 1755 essay “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.” This essay begins with the claim that “There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients” (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, p. 2; in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, volume I). His topic is thus in the first instance the imitation of ancient art, not imitation in ancient art. Winckelmann then attributes the excellent of ancient, that is to say Greek, art to three factors: first, nature in ancient Greece was particularly favorable to the development of beautiful bodies; second, the “natural” way of life in Greece was particularly favorable to the observation of beautiful bodies and thus to their imitation in art; and finally, Greek thought and character were particularly noble, and thus the external beauty of Greek bodies was an expression of the beauty of the Greek mind as the “most worthy part of beauty.” The first of these claims is in the tradition of the emphasis of the influence of climate on human character and society initiated by Du Bos and continued by many eighteenth-century thinkers, including Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748).