Tobias und der Engel

Tobias und der Engel (Tobias and the Angel), dated 1656 and in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, depicts the apocryphal story from the Book of Tobit in which the young Tobias travels accompanied by the angel Raphael — initially disguised as a human companion — to retrieve money owed to his father and, through the fish he catches along the way, heal his father's blindness. The story was enormously popular in Baroque painting for its richly symbolic content: the divine guide walking beside humanity, the healing properties of nature, filial piety rewarded. Preti's 1656 version, painted during his Neapolitan period, emphasizes the human warmth of the relationship between the young traveler and his divine companion, who is shown as a physically present figure rather than a supernatural apparition. The Bavarian holdings of Italian Baroque reflect the Wittelsbach courts' sustained engagement with Italian artistic production.

The double figure of Tobias and Raphael creates a compositional pairing that Preti resolves through contrasted scale — the adult angel slightly larger — and differentiated lighting. The angel's wings, if shown, receive more deliberate light treatment than his humanized flesh. The fish, central to the narrative, appears as a physical prop handled by Tobias with the matter-of-fact grip of a boy who has just caught it.