Lodovico Carracci served his apprenticeship with Prospero Fontana in Bologna and is said to have travelled to Florence, Parma, Venice, and Mantua, probably in the late 1570s. In 1582, with his cousins, the brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci, he founded an Academy in Bologna. He is recorded in Rome in 1602 but based himself in Bologna, where his personal, visionary style remained largely independent of that practised in Rome by his cousins.