Carracci's landscapes do not use the strict linear perspective common in earlier Renaissance painting. Instead he built a sense of depth through the placement of light and shadow and through terraces of land and water, set one above the other and narrowing as they recede, that guide the eye back toward architecture placed in the middle distance^[1]. Walled towns, towers, temples and bridges recur across this body of work, giving otherwise open countryside a fixed point for the composition to organise itself around^[1]. Screens of trees, dark against an even sky, typically frame the foreground^[1].

Carracci arrived at landscape by way of an earlier phase spent painting genre scenes of ordinary life in Bologna during the early 1580s, fishing and hunting subjects, low-life market scenes, and pictures of peasants eating and drinking^[2]. By 1585 he had largely abandoned genre subjects in favour of devotional and history painting, but the observational habits built during those years, the willingness to treat an unglamorous, everyday scene as worth a large, carefully composed canvas, carried directly into his mature landscapes^[2]. Later landscapists, notably Domenichino and Nicolas Poussin, treated Carracci's compositions as their immediate model for building an enclosed, staged landscape space, tracing the method back specifically to his work rather than to any single earlier tradition^[3].