Carracci received the Herrera Chapel commission in 1604, late in a career by then dominated by the Farnese Gallery ceiling and its aftermath. The brief covered eight narrative scenes from the life of St Diego of Alcalá, nine individual figures of saints, and an Assumption of the Virgin for the chapel's altar wall^[1]. The chapel sat inside San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, the church serving Rome's Spanish community, which explains both the choice of a Spanish Franciscan saint and the later Spanish-language association carried by the chapel's name.

Carracci did not paint most of the Herrera Chapel himself. By 1604 he was seriously ill and subject to bouts of depression that left him unable to carry heavy fresco commissions to completion on his own^[1]. The project was directed instead by his pupil Francesco Albani, who brought the decoration to completion around 1610, a year after Carracci's death^[1]. This pattern, a late commission designed or supervised by Carracci but executed largely by his workshop, also governed the roughly contemporary landscape lunettes he made for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini's private chapel, where only two of six scenes are thought to be from Carracci's own hand^[1]. It reflects less a decline in ambition than the physical limits of a fresco painter running out of years.

The workshop that executed the Herrera Chapel scenes had been trained inside the system Carracci himself helped build: the Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna, founded by Annibale, his brother Agostino and their cousin Ludovico in 1582 to reform painting away from Mannerist excess and back toward the discipline of drawing from life^[1]. Francesco Albani was one of a generation of painters, including Guido Reni and Domenichino, who passed through that academy and went on to run major Roman commissions themselves^[1]. A Herrera Chapel mural is as much evidence of that teaching system's reach as it is of Carracci's own hand.