The Artist: The biography of Johann Liss is that of a restless outsider trained in Holstein (in modern north Germany)—outside the cosmopolitan centers of seventeenth-century art. Paradoxically, being an outsider gave him a beneficial critical distance when, through his travels, he came into contact with many of the leading artists of his day, from Hendrick Goltzius, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacob Jordaens to the principal followers of Caravaggio and the pupils of Annibale Carracci. In Venice, where much of his career unfolded, he also studied the work of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese as well as that of his contemporaries—especially Domenico Fetti. From this broad experience he created a style of exceptional originality and expressive power—one that particularly resonated with painters of the next century. His career is poorly documented. Almost everything we know about him derives from the 1675 biography by Joachim von Sandrart, a fellow German artist who lived with Liss in Venice in 1629 and whose biography is therefore based on firsthand information. It is from Sandrart that we learn of Liss’s bohemian habits as well as his unconventional habit of painting: “He would stay away from the house for two or three days and then come back into the room by night, quickly prepare his palette, mixing the colors the way he wanted them and spend the whole night working . . . In the daytime he would rest a little and then continue with his work for another two or three days and nights. He hardly rested and hardly ate. No matter how many times I told him that he would ruin his health that way and shorten his life, it was no good.”[1] Evidently, however, he also found time to draw from the nude model in one of the informal academies in Venice. In Rome, Liss joined the rowdy, iconoclastic, and socially subversive association of Northern painters, the Schildersbent (or Bentveughels, “birds of a feather”), taking the nickname Pan, which might be thought to further underscore his carefree, bohemian lifestyle. Despite the time he spent in Venice, his name appears in the registry of the confraternity of Venetian painters only in 1629, around the same time he completed his great
Inspiration of Saint Jerome for the church of San Nicolò da Tolentino—a work admired by Jean Honoré Fragonard during his visit to the city (see his etching, The Met
17.37.37). Sandrart noted that Liss was “all the more praiseworthy because he surpassed all painters from his region in a way we hitherto could not have imagined any artist from the remote area of Oldenburg could do.”
What We Know: Holstein, where Liss was born and presumably trained, had no strong artistic tradition, and probably by around 1615, he moved to Amsterdam, where, according to Sandrart, the work of the painter-printmaker Hendrick Goltzius attracted him. He must have also spent time in Antwerp, where he would have studied the paintings of Rubens and Jacob Jordaens, whose influence is the dominant factor on his art. Then he went on to Paris and Venice. From Venice, he went to Rome, where, as already noted, he became a member of the confraternity of Northern painters in the city and established a long-lasting friendship with Nicolas Régnier, who perhaps not coincidentally moved from Rome back to Venice at about the same time as Liss—in 1626. Like other foreign artists in Rome, Liss must have worked primarily for the market, which allowed him greater freedom of expression but led to no public commissions or recognition (he is conspicuously absent from the biographies of Giovanni Baglione). He treated the kinds of lowlife scenes that were associated with Northern painters, bringing to them an openly erotic element: in his large, multi-figure painting showing a tavern scene—doubtless the parable of the Prodigal Son (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremburg)—a male figure slips his hand beneath the apron of a woman who, in return, slips hers into his pants. By 1646, this ambitious and flagrantly erotic composition had already found its way into a Dutch collection in Amsterdam, which gives an idea of the international reach of the art market and the demand for this kind of picture.[2] Indeed, Sandrart tells us that “many of his works are in Venice but more are in Amsterdam where they are held in high esteem,” and this is borne out by archival and inventory sources.[3] How long Liss spent in Rome is a matter of conjecture. Sandrart only says “because [Liss] fared well in Venice, he soon returned there.” And, indeed, a large part of his output can be traced to Venice. What implication this has in establishing his movements and a chronology for his work is not certain. Modern scholarship has constructed an ample Roman phase that includes paintings that—like
The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen—have a Venetian provenance. Is this a factor of the art market, or simply an indication that one cannot divide his career into tidily distinct phases? Any chronology of his paintings is bound to be conjectural, constructed on the basis and interpretation of style, as documents are almost entirely lacking. One point of clarity is that by the time he died of the plague in Verona in 1631, his work had opened up “a vista on the future of European painting.”[4] Prized in their time, his paintings were even more admired in the eighteenth century by the Venetian painters Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo as well as by Fragonard. They then fell into general neglect until a revived interest and reevaluation in the mid-twentieth century.
The Picture: Liss has imagined Mary Magdalen—revered in Christian hagiography as a converted prostitute and the first to see Christ after his resurrection—at the decisive moment when she embraces a life of penitence and salvation. She is encouraged by a youthful angel bearing the palm of victory and rejects the riches of the world, symbolized by the tray of luxurious objects that a darker-skinned, turbaned figure offers. In her lap the saint cradles a skull, the emblem of mortality. The unfolding spiritual drama is conveyed through her voluptuous body and dynamic pose—her head thrown back with her eyes half closed and her mouth open as though on the verge of ecstasy.
Mary Magdalen was among the most popular saints in Christian hagiography. Because of her conversion, her dedication to Jesus (whose feet she anointed with perfume and then wiped with her hair), and her retreat to southern France, where she became an ascetic, she was closely linked to the religious practice of confession and penitence (penance being one of the seven sacraments in the Catholic Church). She is most frequently shown as an ascetic in her retreat in the hills outside of Marseille, with a crucifix, ointment jar, and skull. Sometimes, as in Corrado Giaquinto’s painting in The Met (
2006.54), she is succored by angels, who were said to minister to her. In an influential canvas, Caravaggio painted her in ecstasy, her hands folded, her simply garbed figure illuminated by a shaft of light, her head thrown back. The theme of her conversion is most often represented by showing her in meditation, richly dressed, often with discarded pieces of jewelry and/or a mirror (symbolic of her vanity), as in George de La Tour’s
Penitent Magdalen in The Met (
1978.517).
Liss’s interpretation, with Mary Magdalen between two figures, one tempting her with earthly goods and one angelic, departs from these traditions but is not without precedent. The subject had been treated in a similar fashion by Jacob Jordaens in Antwerp in the mid-teens—thus, at a time when Liss might have gained access to his studio. There are two, related compositions by Jordaens, one in the Art Institute of Chicago (see fig. 1 above), and another in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille[5]. Jordaens’s pictures lack both the quality of a dramatic moment and the sensuality of Liss’s. They also show an old woman as the temptress rather than the turbaned figure in Liss’s painting. Although a contemporary source (Boschini 1660) alludes to the figure simply as a “tempter,” this figure may have carried allusions to the Ottoman Empire, the perennial threat to Venetian trade in the eastern Mediterranean and a source of cultural conflict as well as fascination.[6]
Pictorial Dynamics: Liss’s treatment takes its exegetical basis from the
Golden Legend (1260), where we are told: “Renowned as she was for her beauty and her riches, [Mary Magdalen] was no less known for the way she gave her body to pleasure—so much so that her proper name was forgotten and she was commonly called ‘the sinner.’” Like Titian a century earlier, Liss has imagined her as a voluptuous woman, her open blouse exposing her breasts. The suggestive sensuality of Titian’s incredibly popular invention, which is known in multiple versions done at various points throughout his career, established a new pictorial dynamic that was commented upon in Giorgio Vasari’s biography of the artist: “a half-length figure of a disheveled Saint Mary Magdalen with her hair falling over her shoulders and around her neck and over her breast. Raising her head, with her eyes fixed on the heavens, she shows contrition by her reddened eyes and pain for her sins with her tears, so that this picture greatly moves whoever sees it. What is more, although it is very beautiful, it does not inspire lascivious thoughts but commiseration.” In other words, Titian put into play what viewers today would see as incompatible opposites: an erotic sensuality and devotional affect. Liss’s picture must be understood as dramatizing the dichotomy Titian so masterfully resolved—at least from the point of view of Vasari. Patrizia Cavazzini has noted that the frequency of female saints in seventeenth-century collections formed by males was due to the excuse they offered “for gazing at enticing women . . . [and provided] perfect opportunities to justify voyeurism with the pretended moral values of virtue and chastity.”[7] However, unlike Titian and in keeping with the seventeenth-century preference for dramatic scenes, he has chosen to represent the decisive moment when, encouraged by a youthful angel bearing the palm of Christian victory, she turns away from the temptation of the riches of the world and, contemplating her mortality, embraces a life of penitence and asceticism. The saint’s voluptuous body and the pearly glow of her flesh is set in striking contrast to the skull. Light is used to focus attention on the two principal figures, and the sheen of the blue drapery sets off the cranium of the skull. The background is defined by a plain wall, with a shadow cast by a rose stem, creating an irregular shape that echoes that of Mary Magdalen’s head and results in a sort of aureole behind her.
The theme has thus been conceived as a psychomachia—a contest of the soul—in which Mary Magdalen finds herself caught between conflicting urges, personified by the two other figures. An analogous, though secular, theme is the Choice of Hercules, in which the Greek hero must choose between two beautiful women, one representing Virtue and the other Vice (Liss treated this subject in a painting now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). This tendency to treat an interior drama as a confrontation between figures personifying virtues and vices or states of mind was a well-established literary genre and is found as well in the most advanced musical dramas of the day, a prime example being Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s
Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (Representations of the Soul and Body), performed at the Oratorian church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome in 1600. In the first act, the soul and the body contend with each other, ending with the body surrendering to the soul. We might imagine Liss’s Magdalen as saying the concluding lines: “Alas, who can counsel me. To which of the two shall I cling? The soul comforts me. My senses transport me: my flesh tempts me. Eternity frightens me. O misery, how shall I choose? What if I choose wrongly? No. no. It is not just. That for brief pleasures and out of a misguided choice I should lose Heaven, God, and eternal life. Yes, my soul, the choice is made. I will journey with you. And will search with love for eternal life, the Savior and paradise.”[8]
By these means, Liss created an image of extraordinary dramatic intensity. A copy of the picture in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden attests to the admiration it elicited. Liss isolated and adapted the figure of Mary Magdalen for a more conventional painting.[9]
The Date: The picture is usually discussed in tandem with another major work showing Judith and Holofernes (National Gallery, London; fig. 2)—an incredibly popular subject because of the place it gave to a courageous female protagonist (a
femme forte, or strong woman) and because the violence inherent in the episode especially appealed to seventeenth-century sensibilities (an example of the fascination with violent themes and transgressive female dominance is Guercino’s
Samson Captured by the Philistines, The Met
1984.459.2). Here again, Liss demonstrated his independence from established conventions. Whereas most seventeenth-century artists depicted Judith in the act of cutting off the commander’s head with a sword—the act of violence—Liss chose a subsequent moment, showing the victorious biblical heroine preparing to leave the commander’s tent, having performed her gruesome task. The artist foregrounded the grisly, decapitated torso of Holofernes, emphasizing his bleeding neck and bloodstained, limp arm, while Judith, portrayed from the back as she hands the severed head to her maid, who is shown as an African woman, turns to engage the viewer with a conspiratorial gaze. The shimmering satin of her trailing dress links the decapitated male torso to his female conqueror. No other painter had depicted the scene in this fashion, shifting the subject from a violent act subverting social norms to something more psychological, in which the viewer is made complicit. These new spatial dynamics—both physical and psychological—relate to ideas explored by the young Bernini in a series of landmark sculptures undertaken in the early 1620s for Cardinal Scipione Borghese (today in the Galleria Borghese, Rome). In these works, the active pose of the body, the sensual treatment of the flesh, and the powerfully emotive expressions activate a psychological space with the viewer. One thinks, for example, of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s
David or
Pluto and Proserpina. The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen incorporates these ideas, especially the insistence on the sensual presence of the figure and a latent, destabilizing eroticism that, for modern viewers, verges on the shocking but that, as already noted, had a long history in Venetian painting and was to be a feature of other artists in the city, such as Guido Cagnacci (see
The Death of Cleopatra, The Met
2016.63). The pairing of the handsome angel, his face emanating confidence and his arm seeming about to embrace the saint, and the agitated abandon of Mary Magdalen bear comparison with Bernini’s
Apollo and Daphne of about 1622–25.
The first half of the 1620s in Rome was a moment of extraordinary innovation. Through the presence of a group of young artists from across Europe, the two contesting strands of the previous decades—the realist revolution of Caravaggio and the idealist principles reaffirmed by Annibale Carracci and his pupils—were appropriated and reconceived in ways that set the stage for the dramatic and intentionally rhetorical style that has come to be known as baroque. Key painters with whom Liss would have come into contact include Guercino (who was in Rome between 1621 and 1623 from his native Cento); the French painters Simon Vouet, Valentin de Boulogne, and Nicolas Regnier; Artemisia Gentileschi (who returned to Rome from Florence in 1620 and became closely associated with the members of the Schildersbent); and Giovanni Lanfranco (especially in his murals in the Sacchetti Chapel in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini of 1623–24).
Judith in the Tent of Holofernes and
The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen represent Liss’s engagement with and response to this particular moment. What is unique to Liss is the active brushwork he had acquired during the years he spent in Venice—not only from his study of Titian and Tintoretto, as reported by Sandrart, but also his study of the work of Domenico Fetti (see The Met
1991.153 and
2007.91). A parallel for this neo-Venetian style is found in the early work of Nicholas Poussin and his erotically charged paintings featuring the nude female (for which the closest analogy with Liss is another painting in the Museum’s collection,
1999.121).
Modern scholarship has proposed that Liss was in Rome between about 1622 and 1625, the earlier date reflecting his membership in the Schildersbent, formed around 1620 as a counterweight—indeed a protest—to the Accademia di San Luca and its idealist theories. The Schildersbent comprised Northern (often Protestant) painters who specialized in mock ceremonies and drinking. It encouraged transgressive behavior and vehemently opposed the hierarchies that dominated contemporary artistic theory.[10] How long Liss actually spent in Rome is unknown. And it remains problematic whether the works that are thought to reflect Liss’s stay in Rome, about which we have no documentation, were necessarily painted there. Sandrart notes only that the artist returned quickly to Venice, where his art was appreciated. Moreover, whereas a notable number of Liss’s paintings have a Venetian provenance, there are none certainly from Roman collections, including the two that, on grounds of style, seem most likely to have been painted for a Roman-based market: the
Prodigal Son (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), which is first recorded in Amsterdam in 1646; and the
Satyr and Peasant (National Gallery, Washington), with its marvelous naturalism and distinctively Caravaggesque treatment of light, which has an eighteenth-century Spanish provenance. The obvious question is whether
The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen may not have been painted in Venice rather than Rome, as is usually assumed (in his 1959 monograph on the artist, Steinbart believed almost all of Liss’s surviving pictures were painted in Venice). Alternatively, did Liss send his paintings back to Venice to be marketed?[11] Regardless, a plausible date would be about 1624–26.
History of the Picture: The Temptation of Saint Mary Magdalen must be the picture described by Marco Boschini in
La Carta del navagar pitoresco, published in 1660 (see Refs.). Written in verse, Boschini—a painter/printmaker who restored, appraised, and sold Venetian paintings—describes various works of art in Venetian collections, among which is that of the Bonfadina family, whose palace was on the Cannaregio Canal and whose collection was, according to Boschini, “among the most esteemed galleries (so far as concerns paintings by living artists).” The collection contained works by, among others, Nicolas Regnier, Pietro della Vecchia, Bernardo Strozzi, and Pietro Liberi. This is important. Regnier was a close associate of Liss (he and Liss accompanied Sandrart during his visit to Venetian churches and collections); he was alive at the time Boschini was writing; and he was in a position to inform Boschini whether the Bonfadina picture was a copy—were Boschini in doubt (which he wasn’t).[12] Boschini writes: “By Johann Liss [there is] the dolorous Magdalen who is comforted by an angel, and in a corner is that cursed temptation, which tries to make her seek her own ruin.” (De Gian Lis Madalenna dolorosa, / Che l’Anzolo socore; e in tun canton / Chè quela maldeta tentation, / Che studia in darno a farla ambiciosa). Unfortunately, we know nothing further about the Bonfadina collection and its dispersal. Prior to the rediscovery of The Met’s picture in 1994, this passage was associated with what we now know to be a copy in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, purchased prior to 1765 for the prestigious collection of Frederick Augustus III, Elector of Saxony. Among Frederick Augustus’s advisers was the Venetian polymath Francesco Algarotti, who owned no fewer than five works attributed to the artist. In all probability, then, the Dresden picture was acquired in Venice at more or less the same period as The Met’s picture, further suggesting that greater weight should be given to it having been painted in Venice rather than in Rome—something also suggested by its brilliantly fluid and open brushwork. To judge by the dimensions of the Dresden painting (114 x 131.5 cm), The Met’s composition is missing approximately eleven centimeters along the bottom. The canvas must have been trimmed to adapt it to its later placement as an over-mantel in the billiard room at Edgcote House in Northamptonshire (fig. 3). The house was rebuilt by Richard Chauncey between 1747 and 1753, with elaborate interior woodwork carved by Abraham Swan and Co., and this is probably when the installation occurred.[13] Whether the picture was specifically purchased for this purpose or was already owned by Chauncey cannot be said. Its presence in the house was known to the literature (for example, the picture is cited as a copy in Klessman 1975), but few people seem to have seen it. It remained in the house until 1994, when Brian Sewell and Francis Russell recognized its outstanding quality. Its appearance at auction that year caused a sensation and resulted in a reappraisal of its status by the leading Liss scholar, Rüdiger Klessmann (see Refs).
Keith Christiansen 2020
[1] See the English translation of Sandrart’s biography in Klessman 1975, pp. 179–80.
[2] Klessman 1999, p. 50, assumed that because of its dimensions this picture was a commission, evidently unaware that there was nothing unusual in pictures of this size being painted for the market. Indeed, the evidence—Ribera and Valentin de Boulogne are prime examples—points in the opposite direction: that the market was the way Northern artists without contacts established their place in Rome, often painting ambitious compositions.
[3] Klessman 1975, pp. 181–88.
[4] Rudolf Wittkower,
Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750, 1958, ed. 1965, p. 67.
[5] See Michael Jaffé,
Jacob Jordaens 1593–1678, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1968, p. 73, no. 7.
[6] For a survey of the complicated Venetian attitude toward the Ottoman court, see Paul Kaplan, “Black Turks, Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity," in
The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750, ed. James G. Harper, Burlington, Vermont, 2011, pp. 41–64.
[7] Patrizia Cavazzini,
Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome, University Park, Penn., 2008, p. 115.
[8] From the libretto of a recording by the Istitutioni Harmoniche, Marco Longhini (Stradivarius)
[9] See the various essays in the exhibition catalogue,
Les Bas-fonds du baroque: La Rome du vice et de la misère, eds. Francesca Cappelletti and Annick Lemoine, Villa Medici, Rome and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 2015.
[10] Klessmann 1999, pp. 144–45, no. 15.
[11] See Klessmann 1999, who, operating according to an outdated art historical template, assumed that Liss had patrons in both Venice and in Rome, though there is no evidence of this. Rather, like so many of his Northern contemporaries, he was dependent on the art market.
[12] For a review of Boschini, his art dealing and the Venetian market, see Philip Sohm in
Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters, eds. Richard E. Spear and Phlip Sohm, New Haven, 2010, pp. 214–16.
[13] See Tipping 1920, pp. 46–54 and Tipping 1921, pp. 289–99.
