The Galleria's director Giulio Cantalamessa saw the work in a private house in Tivoli and corrected its misattribution to Titian.

[4] According to the Bible, the archangel Raphael helped the young Tobias during a dangerous journey, until he obtained the antidote to cure his father's blindness, from the entrails of a fish that had tried to bite him while crossing a river.

Savoldo represents the moment in which the angel tells the young man to catch the fish, while the little dog that accompanied them appears curled up at the bottom right.

Physically, the angel with long hair and delicate features closely resembles the one depicted by Titian in the Averoldi Polyptych, painted a few years earlier for a church in Brescia.

In the kneeling young man, the artist placed all that immediate realism typical of the Brescia Renaissance masters, of which he was a member, particularly in the flesh, very alive and sanguine, or in the natural pose that overshadows the face.