Tobias with the Angel

An escort inside a landscape

Raphael's office in the tradition is accompaniment: he walks beside a traveller for the length of a journey and then goes. That is the only angelic function in the scheme requiring a road, and it is why this one story kept being painted long after the altarpiece stopped being the standard vehicle for a religious picture. A road can be a landscape. Seven entries in this catalogue record the Tobit story, and the later ones migrate steadily out of the religious categories and into topography.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1843 and gives Károly Markó the Elder, filed as Hungarian — the only Hungarian entry among the 224 works on this site — with the style term Romanticism. It measures 31.5 x 41 cm, small and horizontal. The measured colour families are brown and yellow. No location is recorded for this entry, so no collection is named here. The subject fields file the work under landscape, forest and river, with no religious category at all.

Rank reduced to staffage

When a subject is filed as landscape, the figures in it become scale and incident rather than argument. The angel keeps its wings and loses its position: no order, no name in the title, no ceremony. That is not peculiar to this picture. Of the 224 entries here, 54 are dated to the nineteenth century, and in that group the hierarchy has already stopped being a subject.