When Winckelmann coined the term ‘eclecticism’, the cultural and artistic hegemony of the time promoted the artistic ideal of the belle nature, which largely built on Bellori's idea del bello. As Bellori stated, ‘painters and sculptors, selecting the most elegant beauties of nature, perfect the Idea, and their works come to surpass and remain superior to nature, which is the ultimate merit of these arts’. Painters and theorists alike were thus open to the term in its most general meaning.

It may be assumed that in applying this term to the work of the Carracci, Winckelmann, who borrowed it from philosophy and applied it to artistic creation, sought to refer to what was commonly known about the Carracci's connection to their classical heritage, as well as to the great masters of the sixteenth century. Yet by the nineteenth century, the original, comprehensive definition of this term had become distorted and limited. Eclecticism ceased to be viewed as a container encompassing all the stylistic possibilities among which one could pick and choose. Instead, it came to be viewed through the prism of Baudelaire's derisive metaphor of a ship advancing towards its destination with sails set to four opposing winds, and came to be derided as a mechanical attempt to incorporate different and even opposing styles into a single work of art. This distorted definition of eclecticism and its negative implications had a devastating impact on the popularity of the Carracci and of their immediate Bolognese followers.