Tobias and the Angel

An unnamed angel with a named job

The title gives a boy and an angel and no rank. Convention fills the gap: the travelling companion of Tobias in the Book of Tobit is the Archangel Raphael, and the pairing of the two figures is one of the most stable identifications in Western religious painting. It is worth stating that the identification comes from the convention and not from this record, which supplies only the two words of the title.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1863 and gives Eduardo Rosales, a Spanish painter, with the style term Purism. It measures 198 x 118 cm — a tall format at close to life scale — and the measured colour family is brown. The recorded location is the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

A nineteenth-century angel

By 1863 the Tobias subject was some four hundred years old in Western painting, and its survival that late says something about what kind of angel Raphael is. Choirs and hierarchies fell out of use with the altarpieces that housed them; the guide who walks a young man home did not, because the story is human-scaled and does not require a heaven to be painted around it. An escorting angel needs only a road.