Gottsched was the "pope of literature" of the early Enlightenment, representative of a classicist rule-governed poetics and theatre reformer. His doctrine of the imitation of nature paved the way for the bourgeois literature of the Enlightenment.
In 1724 he fled to Leipzig from the military recruiters of Frederick William I and in 1727 he became a spokesman of the "German Society", in 1730 a professor, later several times a rector of the university. Already Lessing and the advocates of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) era criticised his strict aesthetic norms. Even the Romantics mocked him because he banished the character of the "Hanswurst" (harlequin) from the stage.
His main work is the "Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Teutschen" (Attempt at a Critical Poetics for the Germans) (1730)
Illustration: Leonhard Schorer (1715-1777): Johann Christoph Gottsched, Königsberg, 1745.
The picture of the Königsberg painter is the only portrait painting for which Gottsched himself was the model.