but also "lower down", which is not without sexual connotations. Arcangeli then fled, leaving Winckelmann screaming down the stairs: "Look what he did to me! ". Winckelmann spent his last hours doing his will and forgave Arcangeli. He was buried the next day at the cemetery of the Trieste Cathedral. Arcangeli was arrested, however, and sentenced to death on 18 July to be beaten alive on a wheel on the square in front of the inn. The sentence was executed two days later, on 20 July. Hypotheses The news of the bizarre crime spread in learned Europe and made a huge impression (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for example, always remembered when and where he received the news of Winckelmann's death). Winckelmann's assassination became object of many speculations and narratives in private correspondences and discourses as well as in forensic reports, articles and public speeches. Prof. Lionel Gossman, for example, believes that there are reminiscences of Winckelmann's murder, whether conscious or not, in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1913). Arcangeli held six interrogations, during which he provided contradictory versions of events: he said he had killed him for believing him a spy, then only to rob him, then for believing him a Jew or a Lutheran (Arcangeli would have been suspicious of a book written with strange characters that he had noticed on the scholar's desk – but actually written in Greek). Apparently, Arcangeli did not think Signor Giovanni was rich, and in the flight after the attack he did not subtract the two medals. The strangeness of Winckelmann's behavior was also noticed, i.e. his registration under assumed name, the absence of any contact with authorities or notable people during his stay in Trieste as well as his association with a disreputable individual like Arcangeli and his reticence to openly identify himself in the hours before his death. It is commonly thought that Winckelmann was killed during an attempted robbery, but the hypothesis of a sexual crime was also popular: contemporaries had no doubts about Winckelmann's homosexuality, seeing it as part of Winckelmann's true love for the Classical antiquity, and there was the suspicion that the scholar was killed for having made advances to an unwilling (or no longer willing, given the number of days spent together) Arcangeli. References Bibliography 1737 births 1768 deaths Italian chefs 18th-century criminals Italian people convicted of murder People convicted of murder by Italy Executed Italian