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| Jacob Philipp Hackert The Borghese Casino at Pratica di Mare (detail) 1780 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Jacob Philipp Hackert The Borghese Casino at Pratica di Mare 1780 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Jacob Philipp Hackert Ruins of the Temple of Venus at Baia 1799 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin |
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| Anton Kern Rinaldo and Armida in the Magic Forest (scene from Gerusalemme Liberata of Torquato Tasso) 1734 oil on canvas Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Anton Kern Flora and Venus, or, Allegory of Spring 1747 oil on canvas Germanische Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg |
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| Anton Kern Circumcision of Christ ca. 1740 oil on canvas Palazzo Pretorio, Prato |
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| Anton Kern Hector's Farewell to Andromache before 1747 oil on canvas Belvedere Palace, Vienna |
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| Anna Dorothea Therbusch Young Lady in Negligée ca. 1769-70 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Anna Dorothea Therbusch Self Portrait ca. 1782 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Anna Dorothea Therbusch Self Portrait (detail) ca. 1782 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Georg Anton Abraham Urlaub Badminton Players ca. 1770 oil on canvas Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs George Clavering Cowper, 3rd Earl Cowper ca. 1770-73 oil on canvas Pinacoteca della Cassa di Risparmio, Florence |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico 1758 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Wilhelm Tischbein Helen of Troy ca. 1787 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Wilhelm Tischbein Paris, Prince of Troy ca. 1787 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
Tischbein's pair of seeming portraits of lovers Helen and Paris, whose affair ignited the Trojan War, were not constructed with the aid of actual models, nor were they based on traditional likenesses handed down by earlier artists. Likewise, Tischbein shows no interest in expressing the received characters or personalities of these legendary individuals. His sole purpose is to exercise Neoclassical principals of idealized physiognomic proportion. The sources are engraved drawing manuals of the period, which in their turn were based on a well-established canon of surviving antique sculpture, carved gems, and coins. Ironically, this standard of "Grecian beauty" made little use of actual artworks surviving from Ancient Greece itself – of which very few were yet available for study by mainstream Europeans, even at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead, this ideal derived from late-Roman pastiches, often misidentified (even by eminent scholars like Johann Joachim Winckelmann) as authentically "Greek."