The Archangel Raphael with Tobias

This panel is one of three that come from the lower tier of an altarpiece made for the Duke of Milan, and shows the Archangel Raphael, hero of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in the Old Testament.The book is named after a blind old man, Tobit – a merchant and devout Jew – who sent his son Tobias on a long journey. Raphael was sent to accompany the boy, disguising himself as one of his relatives. An expansive landscape was an appropriate background to the subject, and here it is a continuation of that in The Virgin and Child with an Angel and The Archangel Michael.Tobias holds a freshly caught and gutted fish: Raphael had instructed him to keep its heart, liver and gall. According to the text, Raphael explained that these could be used as an ointment to cure blindness and burnt to drive away evil spirits. He holds the precious organs in a little box. The pair were joined in their travels by Tobias’s dog. We can only see its head at the bottom of the panel, as the lower edge – like that of the other panels– was cut down in the eighteenth century.Perugino was well known for his ’sweet‘ style, which is particularly apparent here in the look Tobias and Raphael share and in the way they tenderly grip each others’ fingers. He planned their poses in a drawing from life (using workshop assistants) now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The fish is painted with great skill – Perugino has taken particular care to show the faceted structure of the gill, and the sheen of its finely freckled silvery scales. As in the other panels, this naturalistic effect is achieved through his expert blending of oil paint.Unlike Verrocchio’s version of the same subject, Perugino’s picture does not show the figures wearing the latest fashions – the emphasis is on Raphael’s protection of the boy. This is because the panel was made to celebrate Raphael, who takes his place in the altarpiece along with his fellow archangels: Michael on the left panel in the same tier and – Gabriel in the upper tier (now in the Musée d‘Art et d’Histoire, Geneva).