The primary goal of Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing is to provide a ground-breaking model for a new kind of book on Italian drawings. In addition to covering the traditional scholarly terrain of chronology, style, and connoisseurship, this book utilizes up-to-date art historical methods, including considerations of the historical context of Bologna, its impact on Ludovico's art, and a new portrayal of the role of women and women artists in the city. He was a prolific draftsman who produced over 300 extant drawings. His drawings offer the key to his artistic personality, because he conceived his original subjects and planned his dramatic compositions in these sheets. Like most Italian artists of the early modern period, Ludovico developed his ideas in drawings and began painting only after his conceptions had been finalized. Thus his drawings reveal how he thought, how his ideas changed, and which features of a composition were most important or challenging to his creative imagination. The Carracci have always been considered some of the most important draftsmen in Italian art, for their revival of drawing the human figure from life in the course of designing paintings. But Ludovico's drawings were not only preparatory studies for pictures. He was also an innovator in developing finished compositional drawings that were produced as works of art in their own right, made for sale to a new audience of private collectors in Bologna.