Three Archangels with Tobias

In 15th-century Florence, families that lived by trade sent their teenage sons off on long journeys with the goods, and they prayed for those boys to the archangel Raphael, who in the Book of Tobit walks the young Tobias safely there and back. That story is what this panel shows: the boy Tobias, small between the angels, holding the fish whose gall will cure his blind father, with the little dog that went along on the road. What is unusual is the company. Instead of Raphael alone, all three named archangels appear together, Michael in armor on the left, Raphael in the center, Gabriel with his lily on the right. Painted around 1470, it fit Florentine taste so well that it soon inspired a younger painter, Filippino Lippi, to try the same three-angel grouping.