Hellenism (neoclassicism)

As a neoclassical movement distinct from other Roman or Greco-Roman forms of neoclassicism emerging after the European Renaissance, it most often is associated with Germany and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For Winckelmann, the essence of Greek art was noble simplicity and sedate grandeur, often encapsulated in sculptures representing moments of intense emotion or tribulation.

In England, the so-called "second generation" Romantic poets, especially John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are considered exemplars of Hellenism.

Drawing from Winckelmann (either directly or derivatively), these poets frequently turned to Greece as a model of ideal beauty, transcendent philosophy, democratic politics, and homosociality or homosexuality (for Shelley especially).

[5] The bland Arcadia such writings presented was echoed pictorially in the art of Puvis de Chavannes, who in turn influenced the early Picasso of the Blue Period.