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The Healing of Tobit
Bernardo Strozzi (Italian, 1581?-1644)
c. 1625
- Medium
- oil on wood
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 57.2 x 80 x 10.2 cm (22 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 4 in.); Unframed: 42.7 x 65.5 cm (16 13/16 x 25 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund and Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This scene is the moving conclusion of the story of Tobias, the young man at the right. It addresses the themes of family devotion and trust. Tobias’s father sent him on a long journey to retrieve family money. The angel Raphael appeared as a relative, offering the traveler protection against such things as an attack by a huge fish, whose organs Tobias took on Raphael’s advice. Upon his return home, Tobias discovers his father has gone blind, and Raphael advises him to place the fish’s gallbladder on his father’s eyes to cure him. Strozzi depicts the miraculous cure and the moment in which Raphael reveals that he is an angel.
