The present paper investigates the fortune of a postural invention appearing in an important painting by Ludovico Carracci recently brought to the attention of scholarly studies, datable to around 1590: 'Alexander the Great visiting the family of Darius', formerly in the Tanari collection in Bologna and now with the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. A natural, realistic pose and gesture, the result of fresh observations of human form and behaviour that were central to the Carracci reform, capable of bestowing even on a dressed-up subject of ancient history a modernly existential dimension. The idea reappears in other works by Ludovico, although in the years around 1600 it also became typical of various young disciples of the Carracci 'stanza', like Francesco Brizio, Giacomo Cavedoni and even Guido Reni. This enables the author to measure concretely the appeal exerted by the master's models on his pupils and, at the same time, to reattribute both to Ludovico, and to Cavedoni and Reni, new and otherwise unacknowledged works.