Workshop of Agostino Carracci

Agostino Carracci was the engraver and scholar of the Bolognese family, elder brother of Annibale and cousin of Ludovico, and his prints carried the Carracci style far beyond Bologna. He worked beside Annibale on the Farnese gallery in Rome until the brothers fell out around 1600, then moved to Parma, where he died in 1602.

Workshop of means a picture made in the master's studio, by assistants working to his designs or under his eye, with no single hand named. At the Galleria Borghese it covers a canvas of Saint Catherine of Siena in ecstasy, the Dominican nun held up by angels as she receives the stigmata, which by tradition happened in 1375, with the crown of thorns, a heart and a crucifix around her. The inventory of 1790 listed it as Agostino's, and some critics preferred Ludovico or his school. The museum's catalogue connects the emotional pitch of the figure with Agostino's study of Correggio, the Parma painter, and it keeps the canvas, 90 by 69 centimetres, in storage.