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.
The latter was the unsystematized philosophy of general culture which we find in the work of the great writers of the classical period, Lessing, Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller and Herder.
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).
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.
However, from 1750 onwards, arguments arose between him and his subordinates, until he abandoned his responsibilities as head of the excavations and left his duties to people such as Winckelmann, Karl Jakob Weber and Francisco Cajigal de la Vega.