In keeping with an age-old scholarly practice, Winckelmann derived much of his archaeological and art-historical work from existing literature which he excerpted to an extensive degree. The sources he studied and interpreted range from works of antiquity to writings of the Renaissance and Baroque eras to contemporary publications from the 18th century, and thematically refer to practically all areas of scholarly knowledge of that period. One of the tasks of the project is to more precisely identify the sources Winckelmann consulted, which – via his excerpt booklets – found their way into his ground-breaking historical opus Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture of 1755, a central art-theoretical work that marked the inception of the historical study of the humanities.
