Landscape with Tobias laying hold of the Fish

Domenichino's landscape with Tobias and the fish belongs to a tradition of small devotional landscape paintings in which biblical figures appear within carefully constructed natural settings. The story of Tobias — guided by the angel Raphael to catch a fish whose organs would later cure his father's blindness — was popular in the Bolognese Baroque as a subject combining landscape painting with religious narrative. Domenichino was one of the principal founders of the classical landscape tradition later elaborated by Claude Lorrain.

The figures of Tobias and Raphael are small in proportion to the surrounding landscape, following the classical landscape convention. Domenichino's handling of light and recession — cool shadows contrasting with warm distant plains — demonstrates the systematic approach to landscape organisation that influenced later French painters in Rome. The riverbank setting is naturalistically rendered.