“It is in his early works that Ludovico Carracci expresses his most candid view of the world, perhaps his truest and most peaceful sentiment, his calm, luminist vision. Life is there, before us, in its anonymous, modest presence, and time seems to pass slowly on a wave of days that are all the same. Religious feeling and quiet existence coincide.

The years passing in the quiet room depicted in the San Giorgio ‘Annunciation’ do not seem to be the same as those that led to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. The time does not seem to be that which witnessed Philip II’s dark, ambitious dreams for his ‘invincible armada’. For works such as these, the profoundly humane bourgeois sentiment of which can be understood by everyone, it is quite correct to speak not of Counter-Reformation but of ‘Catholic reform’. The painting is just as restrained as the life it expresses: a rich palette of brown shadows with a few lilacs, pinks, whites, reduced by the prevalence of the luminous glow; a simple, lively, though by no means ostentatious, handling of the brush …”

 “The composition has an archaic simplicity within an almost neo-15th-century perspective frame, but this is nothing other than the support for a calm yet studied luminist experiment, with three sources: a main light that bathes the protagonists from the foreground, the light of the dove and the glimpse of light from a side door. It has nothing to do with the spectacular luminism of the still active Tintoretto, but it does relate in part to the luminism that was soon to come from Caravaggio. It is like a quiet heralding of the 17th-century quest for ‘truth’, human and that of setting; and this truth is also matched by the palette, limited to a deep, almost monochrome tone, with an almost ‘Spanish’ severity”.