  Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the son of a cobbler  from Prussia, studied at Halle and Jena, and became a school  teacher. But at thirty-one he got a position as a librarian for a  nobleman in Dresden, and gained access to the court of the Elector  of Saxony, home of one of the great art collections of Europe, and  also a Catholic court that ultimately gave him access to Rome. He  established his reputation in 1755 with an essay “On the  Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture.” He moved  to Rome later that year, in the service of the Papal Nuncio to the  Saxon court, and in 1758 entered the service of Cardinal Allessandro  Albani, the nephew of Pope Clement XI and owner of a great  collection of antiquities. In 1764 Winckelmann published The  History of Ancient Art to great acclaim. He was working on a  revision of it when he was murdered in Trieste in June of 1768,  while returning to Rome from Vienna, where the Empress Maria Theresa  had awarded him a collection of gold and silver medallions.