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Allegory of Christian Belief
Johann Liss (German, c. 1597–1631)
c. 1622
- Medium
- pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash; framing lines in pen and black ink
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 15.3 x 9.4 cm (6 x 3 11/16 in.)
- Culture
- Germany
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
This exceedingly rare drawing is one of only two signed sheets by Liss, who, in spite of the brevity of his career, was one of the most important German-born painters of the 17th century. Here, faith is personified as a woman with bared breasts and bare feet, symbolic of true Christian belief: plain, pure, and without artifice. She has cast aside worldly things-a crown, scepter, and book-and gazes heavenward as smoke wafts from an urn. The long inscription indicates that the sheet is from an album amicorum, or friendship book, in which drawings, poems, and autographs were collected as souvenirs of acquaintanceships. Liss may have made the drawing to dazzle an influential recipient with his inventive interpretation of a traditional religious subject.
