Allegory of Christian Belief (c. 1622): Art, History and Details

Allegory of Christian Belief (c. 1622) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Johann Liss (German, c. 1597–1631).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Allegory of Christian Belief
• Date: c. 1622
• Creator attribution: Johann Liss (German, c. 1597–1631)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash; framing lines in pen and black ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 15.3 x 9.4 cm (6 x 3 11/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1953.6

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Benesch, Otto, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Alfred Stix, Anton Reichel, and Konrad Oberhuber. Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der Graphischen Sammlung Albertina. Bd. 4. Die Zeichnungen der deutschen Schulen bis zum Beginn des Klassizismus : Text / bearbeitet von Hans Tietze [and others] -- Wien: A. Schroll, 1933.
• Steinbart, Kurt. Johann Liss. Wien: Schroll, 1946.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.