Tivoli: Tobias and the Angel

In the autumn of 1828 Turner went back to Rome for his second long stay in Italy, and this time he painted there as well as sketching, even showing a few new canvases in the city. Tivoli, the hill town east of Rome where the river Aniene tumbles down in cascades, he had first drawn on his earlier trip in 1819. Some years later, in his London studio, he rebuilt the place from memory and set a Bible story in it. The two small figures at the lower left are young Tobias and the archangel Raphael, from the Book of Tobit, in which a boy sets out on a long errand with a guide he does not know is an angel. The canvas is nearly finished and was meant as the pair to another Roman scene, of the Arch of Constantine. Both stayed in his studio and came to the nation with the Turner Bequest in 1856.