In the early 1580s, while working alongside his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico on frescoes for the Palazzo Fava, Carracci also produced a run of genre pictures: the Boy Drinking, the Bean Eater, and the Butcher Shop among them^[1]. Low-life genre scenes already had a market in northern Italy by this point, but the established examples, by painters such as Bartolomeo Passerotti and Antonio Campi, tended toward coarse or licentious figures played for comic effect^[1]. Carracci's own family had direct roots in this world: his uncle Vincenzo was a butcher, and one long-standing reading of the Butcher Shop identifies the three men behind the counter as self-portraits of Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico themselves^[2].

What separated Carracci's genre scenes from the Bolognese tradition he inherited was his refusal to treat low subjects as inherently comic. He painted the Butcher Shop at the scale normally reserved for history painting, and modelled the slaughtered lamb in its foreground on Michelangelo's Sacrifice of Noah from the Sistine Ceiling, borrowing a High Renaissance source to elevate an everyday scene rather than mock it^[1]. Contemporaries described the Carracci's own artistic manifesto as painting da viva carne, of living flesh, meaning a rejection of Mannerist artifice in favour of direct observation from life, and the genre pictures of this period were read even at the time as a kind of visual statement of that principle^[1]. By 1585 Carracci had largely set genre painting aside, turning instead to devotional and mythological commissions, with only occasional later exceptions such as the Man with a Monkey of 1590 to 1591^[1].