Landscape with Tobit and the Angel

Tobit or Tobias

The story has two men with nearly the same name. Tobit is the blind father who stays at home; Tobias is the son who makes the journey with the angel. This title names the father and pairs him with the angel, which is a different pairing from the one the road scenes describe. Seven entries in this catalogue record the story: some name the son, some the father, some only the angel, and the difference indicates which part of the narrative a picture takes as its subject.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1670 and gives Salvator Rosa, an Italian painter, filed under Baroque. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded for this entry and no dimensions are recorded, so neither is stated here. The subject fields file the work under landscape, forest, mountain and seascape, and under no religious category at all — the title itself leads with the setting.

An office that requires a road

Raphael is one of three archangels the tradition names, and the only one whose function is accompaniment over distance. That is why his story is the one that migrates into landscape, while the militant and annunciatory offices do not: a rank defined by escort needs terrain, and terrain is a genre. Sixteen titles here name an archangel. This is not one of them, and the archangel is in it regardless, walking through categories the record files under scenery.