Three Angels and Young Tobias

In Florence in the 1480s, Filippino Lippi was still shaking off the manner of Sandro Botticelli, in whose workshop he had trained. This panel was for a long time actually taken for a Botticelli, and you can see why in the delicate faces and falling drapery. It shows the three archangels together, Michael, Raphael in the centre, and Gabriel with his lily, walking with the boy Tobias, who clutches the fish whose organs, in the Book of Tobit, will cure his father's blindness. Guilds and confraternities in Florence favoured Raphael as a protector of travellers, which is why he turns up so often escorting young Tobias. By this date Filippino was pulling toward a nervier, more particular style of his own.