LISS, Johann

This painting is one of a pair depicting biblical stories in ample landscape setting, which lessen the dramatic significance of the scenes. The pendant to this painting is The Sacrifice of Isaac, also in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In the paintings of Liss there is always a vivid sense of the landscape participating in the human events it frames. In Adam and Eve Mourning for Abel the fierce glow of the setting sun casts reddish reflections on the sky, against which stand out two poplar trees and Adam and Eve grieving over the lifeless body of their son in the deepening half-light on the side of the barren hill.

The early training of Jan Lys (Giovanni Liss in Italy) took place in Amsterdam under Hendrik Goltzius who painted very much in the style of the Italian Mannerists. After attending school in Haarlem, he spent two years in Rome as part of the circle of Flemish artists linked by their admiration of Caravaggio. In 1624 he moved to Venice. All his artistic means, which had once been brilliant and sensual, were now aiming for an effect of hazy vagueness and already seemed to offer a foretaste of the Rococo age. A good example from the very limited output of Lys is Apollo and Marsyas where the cruel event of the Greek mythological subject fades into a feeling of silent, panic-stricken excitement.

This composition is known in several versions. The autograph prime version is in the National Gallery, London. The version in Vienna is by the workshop, that in Budapest is probably autograph although this status is debated.

Liss was a German painter who spent some time in the Netherlands then moved to Venice where he became an influential painter.

He painted the subject of Judith in five versions between 1622 and 1628. All show the same figural compositions, the difference is in the colours. The Vienna version is the last of the five.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 17 minutes):

Alessandro Scarlatti: La Giuditta, oratorio, Part I (excerpts)

Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, committed suicide to avoid being taken prisoner by Octavius, who had conquered Anthony, Cleopatra’s lover and Octavius’ rival for supremacy in Rome. Plutarch reports that the Queen wished to die by a serpent’s bite, for the ancient Egyptians believed that this death ensured immortality.

The artist has not chosen to portray the dramatic climax, nor the decision to commit suicide, nor even the snake bite itself, but the moment in which the tension begins to subside. The serpent has done its deadly work, and the young black servant boy holding the basket of flowers is staring with terror-struck eyes at the snake in it, while a servant woman supports her swooning mistress. On the surface of things, very little seems to be happening in this picture, with everything concentrated on the transition between life and death. All the light falls on the young Queen, bathing her body in warm and sensuous colours. All of life itself seems to be concentrated in the colour of her flesh on the threshold of death, whose advent is suggested by her sinking arm and overcast gaze. The central moment in this painting is one of transition, and this is reflected in the move from light to darkness and in the strong graduation of colours from the background to the foreground.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Jules Massenet: Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s aria

In his second Epistle to the Corinthians, St Paul describes the revelations that were made to him. Liss portrays one of the apostle’s visions, `how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’. Above the seated apostle, who is surrounded by books, an angel draws aside a curtain; terrified, Paul shrinks back from the expanse of heaven revealed to him. Angels playing musical instruments gambol in the clouds, and in the distance the Trinity appears. The colours range from the deep violet of Paul’s cloak through the green of the curtain to the most delicate yellow, blue and pink of the clouds. This painting with its extraordinary wealth of brilliant colour is one of the artist’s finest works and seems to anticipate the Venetian painting of the eighteenth century.

With the exception of Adam Elsheimer, Johann Liss was the most outstanding German painter of the seventeenth century. He was born in Schleswig-Holstein c. 1597, spent several years studying in the Netherlands, where he came into contact with the Haarlem painters, principally Goltzius and Buytewech, and with the Flemish followers of Caravaggio in Antwerp (Janssens, Jordaens). Liss then made his way to Italy via Paris. To begin with, he worked in Rome, where he was a member of the Netherlandish artists’ colony, and exactly when he settled in Venice is not known. Until his early death, supposedly a victim of the plague which broke out in 1629, he continued to work in Venice and it was in these last years that he produced his best-known works, among them The Ecstasy of St Paul. Together with Domenico Feti, Liss played an important part in reviving the use of rich colours, a Venetian tradition which had ended with Tintoretto.

In the seventeenth century this painting was in the famous collection of the Amsterdam merchant Gerrit Reynst (died 1658), which consisted mainly of works by Venetian masters and included a companion-piece, The Vision of St Peter, which was subsequently lost. Both pictures were engraved by Jeremias Falck and attributed to Johann Liss, but it seems certain that the St Peter picture was not the work of Liss but of Domenico Feti, who was a close friend of the German painter. It may be that after Feti’s death (1623), his patron decided to commission Johann Liss to paint the companion-picture to the St Peter. The Ecstasy of St Paul came up for sale in Amsterdam in 1722 with the Van de Amory Collection and found its way through a Florentine art-dealer into the Berlin collection of A. von Frey, from which it passed in 1919 to the Picture Gallery.

Johann Liss executed this painting in Venice. The artist, educated in Haarlem and Antwerp, combined in the painting the Dutch realism with the colorism of Venetian artists.

This painting is one of a pair depicting biblical stories in ample landscape setting, which lessen the dramatic significance of the scenes. The pendant to this painting is Adam and Eve Mourning for Abel, also in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In this painting the artist lets the lyric lines of the landscape provide the comment on the unconsummated sacrifice of Isaac, whose life was spared by God to reward the unquestioning obedience of his father, Abraham.

Painted in delicate, tenuous hues, the painting represents the dialogue between St Jerome and an angel. It may well be the most original and important altarpiece produced in seventeenth-century Venice.

Reared in the Dutch and Flemish school, a disciple of Hendrick Goltzius, Liss absorbed a wide variety of experiences in his youth; he acquired at the Haarlem school his zest for the popular approach to portraiture, with glowing colours and firmly clean-cut forms.

Coming to Venice in 1621, he probably met Feti, whose influence mellowed his painting and made for more richly-modulated colouring and light. The material has a fresh look, and is edged with “frills”, thus ushering in the first dawning of the Baroque in Venice.

The Venus is a product of the artist’s maturity from his Venetian period, which saw his attention turning from the genre scene towards themes of mythological inspiration. The sway and spell of his predecessors’ artistry, in particular that of Veronese, as bred by the Venetian milieu is still there; but there is also a foretaste of that bucolic mythologizing which was a prelude to Sebastiano Ricc’s pictorial “symphonies”. The work is a link, then not only in the world of Venetian art, but in the painting of the whole of Central Europe.

The toilet of Venus is a timeless theme of sensuous seduction. You can view other depictions of Venus at Her Toilet in the Web Gallery of Art.