Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance

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John Shearman makes the plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that will recognize the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. His book is the first attempt to construct a history of those Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves in or by the spect

Reviews

"Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Award, College Art Association"
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1993"
"In guiding our concentrated attention to the action that unfolds in [a group of paintings by Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, and others that represent the Entombment], the author has taught us to make the relevant connections and thus to see these deeply moving works with fresh eyes."---E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books
"Shearman's six lectures contribute significantly to current debates about the interpretation of images, particularly in relation to their reception by the spectators."---Martin Kemp, Times Literary Supplement
"As the author of a brilliant work on Mannerism, in which literature and music were employed to explain characteristic forms, Shearman is eminently qualified for his task. [He] weaves a brilliant account of poetry and painting immortalising the sitter."---Bruce Boucher, The Times
"[Shearman's] argument that the observer, in the artist's mind, was as carefully placed, posed and arranged as the content of the work is sustained by considerable intelligence and scholarship."---Robin Blake, Independent on Sunday

Author Bio

John Shearman (19312003) was the Charles Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and the author of many books, including Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 14831602; The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen; and Mannerism.