25 AGOSTINO CARRACCI The principal study, a group of shepherds with their children and animals, was Italian, 1557­1602 employed with little variation in a lost painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Group of Figures in an Agostino's brother Annibale; the appearance of that painting, however, survives in a "Adoration of the Shepherds" copy by Annibale's pupil Domenichino (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland). and Other Studies The antique­style cameo of three bearded men in profile above the main study is a Pen and brown ink caricature, though the identity of the heads remains unknown (for a similar cluster of 40.5 x 30.8 cm (15 15/16 x 12 in.) Cat. II, no. 12; 86.GA.726 caricature heads in profile by the French nineteenth­century painter Degas, see no. 91). Striking the same slightly jocular note are the head of a man with a wispy beard, center right (evidently the same person as on the left in the cameo), and the diminutive head of a cat, in the right corner, which stares out somewhat disconcertingly at the spectator. With his cousin Lodovico and brother Annibale, Agostino was one of the three Carracci who were jointly responsible for the "reform" of Italian painting at the end of the sixteenth century. The new style they established rejected the artificiality of the preceding Mannerist style of painting (see no. 14) and returned more strongly to the study of nature and the antique, as in the High Renaissance period. The Carracci founded an academy of painting in Bologna, which had wide influence. 32 ITALIAN SCHOOL