A young man kneels on a river bank, struggling to pull a large, wriggling fish out of the water. Behind him an angel points to the fish, and is clearly instructing him what to do with it. This is the story of Tobias and the Angel, as told in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. A faithful Jew living in Nineveh, Tobit was blinded by God to test his patience, but his sight was restored by a miracle. He sent his son Tobias to collect a debt. The archangel Raphael, whom Tobias thought was a mortal, went with the young man as his guide, and they reached the river Tigris, where Tobias was attacked by a gigantic fish. Raphael ordered him to catch it and remove its gall, heart and liver.
They travelled on together to Ectabane, where Tobias’s cousin Sara lived. She was prey to a demon who had killed each of her seven husbands. Raphael asked Tobias to marry Sara in spite of his misgivings, and told him to grill the fish’s liver so that the smell would scare off the demon. Raphael, Tobias and Sara then retuned to Nineveh where, again following the angel’s advice, Tobias used the fish gall to restore his father’s sight.
Although this is a biblical story, the setting and dress of the figures is classical in style. Domenichino was a pupil of Annibale Carracci, whose sweeping ‘heroic’ panoramas often included identifiable figures, either from classical literature or from the Bible. Like Annibale, Domenichino structured his landscapes carefully, using a winding river to draw the viewer’s eye into the distance, while two trees act as stage-like wings. The leaning tree on the left parallels the diagonal of the angel’s leaning body, while the gesture of his arm is echoed by the roots and branches of the trees on the river bank behind him.
When this picture was first recorded in the 1679 inventory of the collection of Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna – a patron of Claude who was celebrated for his interest in landscape painting – it was paired with another landscape by Domenichino, Moses and the Burning Bush, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The paintings resemble each other in many ways. Both are painted on sheets of copper of a similar size and the handling of the paint is almost identical. Although the paintings are relatively small, they share a sense of spaciousness and the scale of the figures in relation to the landscape is the same in both. Furthermore, Tobias’s red tunic is the same shade as Moses’s cape. Although the two episodes are seemingly unrelated, both were understood in the Renaissance as forerunners of the virgin birth. The restoration of Tobit’s sight prefigured the Annunciation to the Virgin, while the burning bush was interpreted as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin.
This picture, and its pendant in New York, is an important example of Domenichino’s contribution to landscape painting. None of his small landscapes can be dated securely but there are similarities with the Villa Aldobrandini frescoes, Apollo slaying Coronis and in particular Apollo pursuing Daphne, which were designed in 1616. These landscapes probably date from about the same time.
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