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The author makes a plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that recognizes the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. He challenges the view that work during this period was conventional and unimaginative.

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John Shearman makes a plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that recognizes the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. This book attempts to construct a history of those Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves or by the spectator, that embrace the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition the spectator imaginatively in time and space. He takes his lead from texts and artists of the period, for these artists reveal themselves as spectators. Among modern historiographical techniques, reception theory is closest to the author's method, but Shearman's concern is mostly with anterior relationships with the viewer - that is, relationships conceived and constructed as part of the work's design, making and positioning. Shearman proposes unconventional ways in which works of art may be distinguished one from another, and enlarges the accepted field of artistic invention. Furthermore, his argument reflects on the Renaissance itself.
What is created in this period tends to be regarded as conventional, or inherent in the nature of painting and sculpture: he maintains that this is a careless, disengaged view that has overlooked the process of discovery by immensely inventive and visually intellectual artists.