As a youth, Giovanni Francesco Romanelli lived in Rome for some time with a maternal relation before returning to Viterbo where he studied with the Jesuits who gave him a thorough grounding in the Classics. He, thus, acquired that knowledge of the Antique which was to help him in his career as a painter. It would seem that on his return to Rome he was first with Domenichino (1581-1641) before entering into the orbit of Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), when he was engaged in the 1630’s on the magnificent, Baroque decoration of the Barberini Palace for Urban VIII’s family. Romanelli himself painted frescoes in Anna Colonna Barberini’s chapel in the north wing of the piano nobile of that vast edifice. A protégé of the Barberinis, most notably of the Cardinal Francesco, the artist executed the celebrated frescoes in the Sala della Contessa Matilde in the Vatican between 1637 and 1642. He also executed cartoons for tapestries to be executed in the papal manufactory, as well as large-scale canvases of historical or mythological subjects to be given by the Pope as gifts to reigning monarchs and important personages. These works are all executed in Romanelli’s mature style which combined grandeur and breath of composition with classicising elegance in the figures. He is an important link between French and Italian art because of his two visits to Paris. The first of these between 1646 and 1647, when he painted the principal Gallery of Mazarin’s residence with scenes from Ovid, was a result of the Barberini family’s temporary disgrace and exile from Rome following the death of Urban VIII in 1644. During his second stay in the French capital between 1655 and 1657, he decorated Anne of Austria’s summer apartments in the Louvre and painted works for aristocratic patrons.
Silvia Bruno dates this exquisite copper with Tobias and the Angel in a Landscapewith a Rainbow to 1630-32 when Romanelli, along with Pietro Paolo Ubaldini, Giovanni Maria Bottalla and Giacinto Gimignani (1611-1681), was first active in Pietro da Cortona’s studio. She also notes that this small painting represents Romanelli’s most extensive use of landscape, suggesting that as a young artist he may have been inclined towards that genre. Doctor Bruno compares the present copper to the Moses drawing Water from the Rock in the National Gallery, Olso, and the Hagar and the Angel, formerly on the London art market (Christie’s, 8 December 1995).
According to the Book of Tobit (VI, 2-9), Tobias was travelling from Nineveh to Media to collect a debt for his blind father Tobit, accompanied by his dog and a helpful young man who, unbeknownst to Tobias, was really the Archangel Raphael. A great fish attacked Tobias while he bathed in the River Tigris, but the angel instructed him to haul it onto land and extract the heart, liver and gall for their magical properties. Tobias later used the gall to cure his father’s blindness.
The Book of Tobit is included in the Latin Bible, only being relegated to the so-called Apocrypha by the Protestants much later. As the cult of the guardian angel spread throughout Italy from the Renaissance onwards, the story of Tobias came to symbolize the angelic protection afforded to mankind. The theme was often used by families to commemorate the travels of a son, in whose likeness Tobias would be depicted, whilst the curing of Tobit’s blindness was the subject of votive paintings donated by the sightless in the hope that their vision would be restored. As time passed, the subject of Tobias and the Angel became part of the standard repertory of artists.
We would like to thank Doctor Silvia Bruni for her help in the compilation of this entry. Doctor Nicholas Turner concurred with the attribution of this Tobias and the Angel to Romanelli in a written communication of 4 March 2006.
