Much of his work was in restoring antique Roman sculptures, making casts, copies, and fakes of antiques, fields in which he was pre-eminent and which brought him into contact with all the virtuosi: he was a close friend of and informant for Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
She also addresses the Kopienforschung ("copy research") of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who is finding a type statuary through its Roman copies, focusing on identifying the originality of Roman sculptors.
In Rome, Duquesnoy's student Orfeo Boselli wrote Osservazioni della scoltura antica in the 1650s; his observations reflected connoisseurship of the subtle contours of superior Greek sculpture, considered superior to Roman work, which had been developed in Duquesnoy's circle and would inform the sensibility of Winckelmann and Neoclassicism.
In 1755, he arrived in Rome where he was influenced by Neoclassicism, after studying under Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, aimed in his painting to the restrained classicism of painters from earlier centuries, such as Raphael and Poussin, rather than to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue.
The noted art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, described this sculpture in his History of Ancient Art (published in 1764).
Johann Sebastian Bach | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Johann Strauss II | St. Johann in Tirol | Joachim Murat | Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi | Johann Albert Fabricius | Johann Christian Bach | Johann Georg Wagler | Joachim | Johann Pachelbel | Johann Nepomuk Hummel | Johann Gottfried Herder | Johann Nestroy | Joseph Joachim | Johann Joachim Winckelmann | Johann Gottlieb Fichte | Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach | Joachim von Ribbentrop | Joachim Ringelnatz | Johann Homann | Johann Friedrich Böttger | Johann Kuhnau | Johann Heinrich Lambert | Johann Friedrich Blumenbach | Joachim Wtewael | Joachim Trier | Joachim Peiper | Joachim of Fiore | Solomon Joachim Halberstam |
He edited Isocrates, Panegyricus (1831); with Sauppe, Lycurgus, Leocralca (1834) and Oratores Atticae (1838–1850); with Orelli and Winckelmann, a critical edition of Plato (1839–1842), which marked a distinct advance in the text, two new manuscripts being laid under contribution; with Orelli, Babrius, Fabellae Iambicae nuper repertae (1845); Isocrates, in the Didot collection of classics (1846).