He was a significant figure in, and source about, the later sessions of the Council of Trent, and much later a candidate for the papacy in 1590, and is now mostly remembered for his De sacris et profanis imaginibus (1582), setting out the Counter-Reformation church's views on the proper role and content of art.

Paleotti was, with Molanus and Cardinal Charles Borromeo, one of the most influential writers to write filling out the brief decree of the council on religious images with detailed instructions on their iconography.

He did not become greatly interested in art until the 1570s, when he began work on his Discorso intorno alle imagine sacre et profane, consulting scholars and artists such as Prospero Fontana, Domenico Tibaldi and Pirro Ligorio.

Unlike some clerical writers, he covered secular art, demanding Catholic standards of morality and decorum in that too, though he admitted to a correspondent that artists might be under financial pressures to produce "immoral" works.

[11] The early religious paintings of Ludovico Carracci, working in Bologna in these years, perhaps came closest to Paleotti's prescription, but the Baroque was to take Catholic art in other directions.

An attempt by one scholar to demonstrate direct influence by Paleotti's work on the movement to naturalism in the style of Annibale Carracci failed to convince most art historians, as there was no actual evidence documenting any connection.

Lines also wrote "Gabriele Paleotti and an Unstudied 1583 Dossier on the University of Bologna", in Bologna—Cultural Crossroads from the Medieval to the Baroque: Recent Anglo-American Scholarship, ed.