Tobias and the Angel

Motta Raffaellino called Raffaellino da Reggio

(Codemondo 1550 - Rome 1578)

Identified by critics as the painting executed for Countess Santafiora of Sala Baganza, it had become part of the Borghese Collection by 1650, when it was mentioned with the correct attribution to Raffaellino da Reggio. The panel depicts the famous Biblical episode of Tobias guided by the angel during his journey of redemption. It was executed by Raffaellino in around the 1570s, the period in which he clearly came under the influence of Flemish painting, as is evident in both the changes in his chromatic range and in the open landscape of the background.

Object details

Commentary

A painting with a similar subject by Raffaellino da Reggio was noted in 1616 by Bonifacio Fantini: ‘In Sala, near Parma, we find two paintings made for Countess Sanfiore [sic] [...], the other Raphael and Tobias: this work is so unique that prints were later made of it to show how it depicts the wonder of the young Tobias and the majesty of the angel’ (Fantini 1616). In 1951, Italo Faldi identified the work which Fantini saw in the collection of the noble family Santafiora of Sala Baganza as the panel in question, which was first cited in connection with the Borghese Collection in 1650 (Manilli 1650). Later critics have accepted this theory; it is confirmed by the fact that various paintings, including the Saint Catherine in the Louvre, passed from the rich gallery of paintings of the Santafiora to the collection of Scipione Borghese in Rome (Urlichs 1870; Della Pergola 1955).

The work has always been ascribed to the painter from Reggio Emilia (Manilli 1650), with no scholar calling the idea into question. The attribution is supported by a drawing pointed out by Adolfo Venturi (1893) at the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Uffizi (no. 2014) as well as by an engraving executed by Agostino Carracci (Bartsch 1920), which had previously been mentioned by Carlo Cesare Malvasia in his Felsina pittrice (1678) and rightly published by Faldi, who rediscovered an exemplar in the British Museum.

The work represents a Biblical episode (Book of Tobit, 6:4-6). It depicts Tobias in the company of the archangel Gabriel; the young man is shown holding a large fish, whose gall he spread on his father’s eyes, healing his blindness.

Critics have proposed various dates for the execution of the work. Luisa Collobi (1938) maintained that it was one of Raffaellino’s last efforts, painted shortly before he decorated the left chapel of the church of San Silvestro on Quirinal Hill. Yet her theory was forcefully rejected by Faldi (1951), who rather suggested that it dated to his early career, around 1570, when he came to Rome together with the architect Francesco Capriani; shortly after his arrival he was indeed already playing an important role on the Roman artistic scene (see De Mieri 2012). Building on Faldi’s idea, in 1995 Fiorella Sricchia Santoro dated the execution of the panel to roughly 1573, chronologically close to the works of Jacopo Zanguidi, called Bertoja, at the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome and to Raffaellino’s own production in Caprarola. In fact, this date dovetails with the artist’s style of these years, when his oeuvre shows a certain openness to the influences of Flemish painting, as is evident in both the changes in his chromatic range and the expansion of the background landscapes, features which according to Hauser (1965) betray a blending of Mannerist sinuosity with the exquisite forms developed in the circle of the Zuccari.

Antonio Iommelli