  Winckelmann spent his two years in Halle (1738–40) while Baumgarten was still teaching there and Meier was also a student.  But his writing offers no evidence that he knew their works. His History of Ancient Art does cite Du Bos, Batteux, and the essays of Hume, however, and he had clearly absorbed some of the most general ideas of eighteenth-century aesthetics. A 1763 essay “On the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on Instruction in it” suggests several of the premises assumed throughout his work on ancient art history. He shares with Wolff and Batteux the assumption that art derives its beauty from the imitation of nature, and derives the most beauty from the imitation of beauty in nature. Thus he writes that