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| Ludovico Carracci Holy Family with St Francis and Donors 1591 oil on canvas Museo Civico, Cento |
In 1678 a two-volume work called Felsina pittrice was published in Bologna. Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616-1693) wrote the book to celebrate the lives and careers of contemporary Bolognese painters. The longest section was his Life of the Carracci, an heroic triple-biography of brothers Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609), along with their older cousin Ludovico (1555-1619). Together, the three founded the Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna in1582, attracting crowds of students and followers. Agostino and Annibale moved regularly between Bologna and Rome, where their celebrity became extravagant. Despite his cousins' star-status, Ludovico proved unwilling to leave Bologna, preferring to paint frescoes and altarpieces for local palaces and churches and to oversee the family academy. His personal influence bore heavily on (among others, according to Malvasia) a poor and ambitious local youth named Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1597-1666) who would in the new century – under the trade-name of Il Guercino – stand equal in fame as a painter with the Carracci themselves. Ludovico Carracci's Holy Family with St Francis and Donors (above) was painted in 1591 for the Piombini family chapel in the church of the Cappuccini in Cento, the northern Italian birthplace of Guercino. As Malvasia writes, "See the beautiful altarpiece in Cento, in the church of the Capuchin Fathers, the energy of its color having been the first inspiration and the only model (as Guercino himself has so often told me) for Guercino's use of color, so loved by everyone."
Below then, a further group of influential works from the 1580s and 1590s by the provincial but nevertheless illustrious Ludovico Carracci, all of them works that Guercino could have seen as a young man –
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| Ludovico Carracci The Vision of St Francis of Assisi 1583-85 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Ludovico Carracci St Francis of Assisi in Meditation early 1580s oil on copper Dulwich Picture Gallery, London |
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| Ludovico Carracci Assumption of the Virgin 1586-87 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Ludovico Carracci Madonna dei Bargellini 1588 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Ludovico Carracci Study for The Flagellation 1580s drawing British Museum |
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| Ludovico Carracci The Flagellation 1580s oil on canvas Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai |
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| Ludovico Carracci The Flagellation ca. 1595 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Ludovico Carracci Apparition of the Virgin to St Hyacinth 1594 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Ludovico Carracci The Transfiguration ca. 1595 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Ludovico Carracci Martyrdom of St Ursula 1597 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Ludovico Carracci St Peter in penitence ca. 1595 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Ludovico Carracci St Sebastian 1599 oil on canvas Museo Fondazione Santomasi, Bari, Apulia |
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| Anonymous Bolognese painter Portrait of Annibale, Ludovico, and Agostino Carracci 17th century oil on canvas private collection |
Malvasia's Life of the Carracci – translated and impressively annotated by Anne Summerscale – was published in 2000 by Pennsylvania State University Press.