The three women who visit the tomb are traditionally the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, though the exact identities and numbers shift slightly between the four Gospel accounts^[1]. They come at dawn on the Sunday after the Crucifixion carrying spices, intending to anoint a body that Jewish burial custom required to be properly prepared, only to find the tomb already open and empty^[1]. An angel meets them there and tells them Christ has risen, a moment that painters typically stage with the women caught mid-gesture, some still reaching toward the tomb, others recoiling in astonishment. The scene is distinct from the later Noli me Tangere, in which Christ appears to Mary Magdalene alone in the garden and warns her not to touch him, though the two subjects are often painted as a pair or in sequence^[1].

Carracci's career ran on two tracks that rarely appear together in the same object: monumental fresco decoration for cardinals' palaces, and smaller oil paintings intended for private devotion or a single collector's cabinet. A subject like the Holy Women at the Tomb belongs to the second category. It required none of the architectural planning of a fresco cycle and instead asked for the kind of close, legible figure grouping that Carracci had trained for inside the family academy in Bologna, where drawing from life and the study of Raphael, Correggio and the Venetians formed the whole curriculum^[2]. Pictures of this scale and subject moved easily between collections in a way that a fresco cycle never could, which is part of why so many ended up, as this one did, far from where they were painted.