Short answers, pulled from the story.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann entered the world on the 9th of December 1717 in the town of Stendal. His father Martin worked as a cobbler while his mother Anna Maria Meyer came from a family of weavers.
Winckelmann published his masterpiece Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums in 1764. This work soon became recognized as a permanent contribution to European literature and provided a thorough chronological account of all antique art including that of Egyptians and Etruscans.
He was murdered in Trieste on the 8th of June 1768 in a hotel bed by a fellow traveler named Francesco Arcangeli. The true reason for the murder remains unknown though one hypothesis suggests Arcangeli killed him over homosexual advances.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics during lectures that Winckelmann followed at the University of Halle. Painter Adam Friedrich Oeser later deepened his intense interest in art through their association.
His ideas spread around Europe through Anton Raphael Mengs who was widely regarded as the greatest living painter of his day. Neoclassical artists attempted to revive spirit and forms of ancient Greece and Rome based on theories from Winckelmann.