“For me, there is no doubt that Aspertini’s now famous ‘Apprenticeship Altarpiece’ has, as its almost direct precedent, the ‘Wedding’ in Brera, Raphael’s first full-blown masterpiece. With its date of 1504, it can, I believe, certainly serve as a ‘terminus post’ for the Bolognese artist’s painting.

But in Aspertini there is none of Raphael’s balance and tranquillity, quite the contrary. Aspertini knew well and deeply admired this aspect of Raphael, but he approached it with the same love-hate complex that he also reserved form classicism, drawing opposite meanings. 

He squeezes the space, elevating it still almost like in Vitale’s time; he is greedy, almost furious, in giving new flesh to a humanity that is continually abnormal, individualised, varying between the bloated and the gaunt; he enfeebles the light with the brown twilight that seems to rise like a heavy breath from the thick, densified earth”.