Johann Georg Sulzer, the Swiss aesthetician, was born in Winterthur. After studying in Zürich under J. J. Bodmer, he became a tutor in a private home in Magdeburg in 1743. He then went to Berlin, where he became acquainted with Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Leonhard Euler. In 1747 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium and in 1763 he moved to the new Ritterakademie. Illness forced him to resign in 1773, but in 1775 he was appointed director of the philosophical section of the Berlin Academy, to which he had been elected in 1750.

Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (General theory of the fine arts) was originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe's Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts (1752), but it developed into an original encyclopedia covering both general aesthetics and the theory and history of each of the arts and...