Landscape with Tobias and the Angel

The story here comes from the Book of Tobit. Young Tobias is travelling with a companion who is secretly the archangel Raphael, and when he stops to wash his feet in the river a great fish suddenly lunges at him from the water. He recoils in fright, and that is the instant this painter chose to show. Raphael tells him to seize the fish, whose heart, liver and gall will later serve as remedies that drive off a demon and cure Tobias's blind father. The panel came from a workshop in the orbit of Joachim Patinir around 1512, which is why the sacred errand is set loose across a wide stretch of countryside. For a long time it belonged to the Basel scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, a jurist known for his theories about ancient societies, and it passed down through his family before reaching the museum in 2015.