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# Tobias and the Archangel Raphael in Filippino Lippi's Painting and in Fifteenth-Century Florence
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/toviia-i-angel-filippino-lippi-1475-80-gg-florentsiia/
- Published: 2024-12-16T07:00:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:37:03.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Art, Museums

Tobias and the Angel, Filippino Lippi, 1475-80, Florence.

The walk of Tobias with the Archangel Raphael is the central subject of the Old Testament Book of Tobit. The youth and the Angel go hand in hand, their fair heads inclined towards each other, while a slightly unsteady pose betrays the movement of the very moment. Raphael is in heavenly blue, Tobias in a blue tunic and a red cloak. In the boy's left hand is a fish, in the angel's right a golden mortar for preparing medicines.

Let us speak of the symbols and signs of this painting in more detail.

The merchant Tobit, suddenly struck blind, charged his son Tobias to travel from Nineveh, where their family lived, to Media in order to recover silver left there in safekeeping. When the young man began to look for a companion for the long road, he met, without knowing him, the Archangel Raphael, who agreed to accompany him. Raphael led Tobias through every danger and trial: he helped him to overcome a great fish in the Tigris (a crocodile, possibly, is what is meant), helped him to marry Sarah and to be rid of the demon that killed her husbands, by means of fumigation with the fish's innards and prayer, helped him to recover the debt of silver and to return home happily with his wife's property, and there taught Tobias to cure his father of the white films on his eyes with the gall of the slain fish. Only when Tobit and Tobias resolved to give their companion, who went by the name of Azarias, half of all the wealth brought back from Media did he reveal to them that he was Raphael, one of the seven holy Angels.

This scene became very popular in the 1450s, particularly in northern Italy and chiefly in Florence. For the workshops this was connected with the growing demand from wealthy merchants. The merchants' interest, in turn, lay in the fact that the story of Tobias and the Angel combines the sanctity of repaying debts, a perilous journey undertaken on business, the taking of counsel from one's elders, the dispatching of young sons to other cities to settle family affairs or on a trading mission, and also, what is relevant in every age, the healing of the sick and a young man's entry into adult life. As for the presence in the picture, besides the angel, of a fish, this was read as an allusion to Christ, and the watery expanse of the Tigris as a reminder of baptism.

The principal recognisable details of the subject are the youth and the angel walking together, the fish, the dog and the river valley. Sometimes the angel is depicted wingless (he was, after all, concealing his angelic nature), but for the most part his figure is considerably larger than that of Tobias, who more often appears as a mere boy and in any case of much smaller stature than the angel.

At the same time, this period saw the strengthening in culture, since the late Middle Ages, of the notion of a personal guardian angel. And the image of one of the Seven named Angels was, naturally, desirable in every household. All the more so an Angel whose name meant “God heals”.

It is precisely in the mid-fifteenth century that the names Raffaello and Raffaella came greatly into fashion. The painter Raphael Sanzio, born in 1483, was named in honour of the Archangel.

Filippino Lippi trained in the workshop of his father, Filippo Lippi, who bore the same name, but the father died when the boy was 12\. Filippino then went to study under Sandro Botticelli, and it was during this time that this early work was created. Its early provenance is poorly known, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it passed from one private collection to another, until in 1939 it was presented to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains to this day.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_14568@16-12-2024_10-00-35.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_14569@16-12-2024_10-00-35.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_14570@16-12-2024_10-00-35.jpg)