The Three Archangels and Tobias

Three archangels come down a stony road in step. Michael is on the left in blued plate armour, sword up, an orb held against his breastplate; Raphael is in the centre, peacock-winged, holding the boy’s hand in one hand and holding out a small lidded jar with the other; Gabriel is on the right with the lily of the Annunciation. The boy is Tobias, and he is carrying a fish.

Everything in their hands is quoted from one short book. At the Tigris the angel tells Tobias to “take out the entrails of the fish, and lay up his heart, and his gall, and his liver for thee: for these are necessary for useful medicines” (Tob. 6:5, Douay-Rheims); the gall is what cures his father’s blindness at the end of the journey (Tob. 11:13–15), which is what the jar in Raphael’s hand is for. The small shaggy dog at Raphael’s heel comes from the same book and from nowhere else in Scripture: he goes out with them — “and the dog followed him” (Tob. 6:1) — and comes home ahead of them, “coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail” (Tob. 11:9). Tobias walks the whole way without knowing who is beside him. The disguise holds until the last chapter: “I am the angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord” (Tob. 12:15).

The subject was not a novelty in Florence but a civic commonplace. Merchant families sent their sons out on the roads with money, and a picture of a boy brought there and back by an archangel was read as a blessing on that particular risk; the Uffizi calls the image the definitive representation of the fifteenth century’s devotion to the guardian angel. From 1455 the Confraternity of the Archangel Raphael — a youth company known in Florence as the Raffa — kept a chapel in Santo Spirito, and it is for that chapel that this altarpiece was painted. Botticini was not a hired outsider to it: he joined the company in 1471, and named his son Raffaello.

For most of its recorded life the panel was somebody else’s. It was given to Verrocchio, in whose orbit Botticini was formed, and the confusion was structural rather than careless — Botticini absorbed Verrocchio, Rosselli, Castagno, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli in turn, so his pictures kept dissolving into theirs. Berenson, when he added Botticini to his lists in 1899, said the quiet part plainly: the painters he was adding belonged there “partly because so many of their pictures are exposed to public admiration under greater names. Botticini sounds too much like Botticelli not to have been confounded with him.” The precedent he cites is the worst case: Botticini’s Assumption painted for Matteo Palmieri, now in the National Gallery, “already passed in Vasari’s time for a Botticelli” — and so it does, at length, in the Lives, where Vasari describes it under Botticelli’s name down to the slander of heresy it attracted.

The date is not settled, and the Uffizi contradicts itself in public: its catalogue entry for the panel reads 1485 c., while its own online exhibition In the Light of Angels reads 1467 ca. The Web Gallery of Art, Wikidata and Commons cluster at c. 1470–71, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza’s biography of the painter calls the picture his masterpiece of 1470. That is a spread of nearly twenty years across sources of equal standing. The plate is captioned c. 1470 here because that is where most of them sit, not because the later date has been ruled out.

It has also not been at the Uffizi long. Berenson’s index, in the third edition of 1909, still files it under Florence, Academy, no. 84, Tobias and the three Archangels; the transfer to the Uffizi is usually given as 1919, though no institutional source for that year turned up. Verrocchio’s own Tobias and the Angel, painted at about the same moment and long the picture this one was mistaken for, is also in this collection.