Landscape with Tobias laying hold of the Fish

When this small copper was first recorded, in the 1679 inventory of Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna in Rome, a prince known for his love of landscape and a patron of the painter Claude, it hung as one of a pair. Its partner, also by Domenichino, is Moses and the Burning Bush, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The two are on copper sheets of similar size, and Tobias's tunic is the same red as Moses's cloak. Renaissance readers saw both stories as foreshadowing the Virgin birth. Here young Tobias kneels on the riverbank hauling in a huge fish, while the archangel Raphael, travelling with him in disguise, points at it and tells him what to do. The fish's gall will cure his father's blindness. The picture came to the National Gallery in 1831, in the bequest of the Reverend William Holwell Carr.