The Healing of Tobit

Bernardo Strozzi's Healing of Tobit of ca. 1625 depicts the Old Testament apocryphal narrative in which the angel Raphael directs Tobias to restore his blinded father Tobit's sight using the gall of a fish caught on their journey. The story was particularly popular in seventeenth-century Venice — the Scuola di San Raffaele was dedicated to it — and Strozzi brings to the scene both the physical tenderness of the healing gesture and the dramatic chiaroscuro he had absorbed from Caravaggio's followers in Genoa. Strozzi's ability to render aged, weathered flesh with tactile directness gives Tobit's blind face exceptional pathos, and the angel Raphael's warm, luminous presence frames the miracle as a collision of the human and the divine rendered in wholly physical terms.

Strozzi places the key gesture — Tobias applying the fish gall to his father's eye — in strong directional light that models the hands and Tobit's upturned face with remarkable tactile precision. The impasto in the lighted flesh areas is thick and physically generous, contrasting with thin, transparent glazes in the shadows.