Tobias and the Angel

In Florence in the 1470s, confraternities devoted to the Archangel Raphael were spreading, and pictures of him walking with the young Tobias sold well in a city of merchants. In the Book of Tobit, a devout old merchant living in exile, now blind, sends his son to distant Media to collect a debt, and God sends the angel to go with him. Here the boy holds the receipt, a slip marked ricordo, and a gutted fish, with a thin red line where its belly was slit. The text has him disguised as a relative, but here he has wings and a halo, and both cloaks stream in the wind. The panel comes from Verrocchio's workshop, mostly painted by an assistant whose name is lost. Later in the story Tobias marries his cousin Sarah, whose seven earlier husbands a demon had killed, and the burnt organs of the fish drive it away.