DOMENICO FETTI (Rome, 1589 - Venice, 1623)

Tobias and the angel

Oil on panel, cm. 68x85

The painting has been independently recognized as a work by Domenico Fetti by professors Riccardo Lattuada and Massimo Pulini.
The painting is accompanied by a diagnostic investigation carried out by the Emmebi studio in Rome.
The painting is accompanied by the Export License.
The work is a second autograph version of the painting now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, executed on wood like our example. Both are a precious fruit of the later production of Fetti, at the beginning of the third decade of the seventeenth century. The quick and loose brushstroke, the airy piece of landscape, the studied relationship between architecture and figure show a particularly marked influence of Venetian painting. Of this masterful composition we have evidence of two other autograph editions, both in leading Venetian collections: one, of measures very close to those of our example (65x90 cm), was in the Barbarigo della Terrazza collection until 1850; another is documented by an eighteenth-century engraving by Pietro Monaco which shows its location in the collection of the Giovannelli counts in Sant'Agostino. Both the one and the other could well coincide with the refined work on wood in question here.
LITERATURE: E. Safarik, Fetti, Milano 1990, n. 14, p. 60.
PROVENANCE: Private collection, Rome.