20 Euros Johann Winckelmann

Issued to mark the 300th anniversary of Winckelmann's birth, this coin honors the Prussian-born scholar whose 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums effectively founded art history as a discipline. Working from Stendal in poverty so acute he reportedly sold his library multiple times to survive, Winckelmann eventually secured patronage in Rome — where he spent the last decade of his life cataloguing antiquities he had never seen in their original Greek context, since virtually all his analysis was based on Roman copies.

He was murdered in Trieste in 1768, robbed for a handful of gold medals gifted to him in Vienna.