The paper presents a superb painting on copper representing an ‘Adoration of the Magi’, recently appeared on the French market, which with certain variations repeats an already known and well-documented invention of the great Bolognese painter Ludovico Carracci. This invention could once be admired in a medium-sized canvas painting, lost during the World War II, on a side wall of the Gessi chapel in the church of San Bartolomeo di Reno, Bologna. It was in turn the pendant of another painting, also lost, illustrating a ‘Circumcision’. Both paintings were the subject of printed reproductions over time. The author claims that the new painting on copper deserves the status of an autograph replica for private devotion, on the basis of its eloquent similarities with works dating from the early 1590s, when Ludovico’s style and poetics were profoundly affected by the discovery of the great Venetian Cinquecento. The few yet significant variations and above all the superb quality bear out such a hypothesis. This addition to the artist’s catalogue makes it possible to appraise the intensity of the Venetian influence on the eldest of the Carracci during that brief period of time, precisely because he found himself replicating, certainly at the request of a private individual, an earlier composition that can be dated to the early 1580s, covering it with a splendid new layer of colours.