The Prodigal Son

Liss's remarkable career, cut short by his premature death from the plague raging in Venice in 1629-30, was spent far from his native Germany. He left for Holland in about 1615 and never returned to his homeland. Along with Adam Elsheimer, he was one of the few seventeenth-century German artists whose paintings were widely known across Europe. The unusually large number of autograph repetitions attests to the demand for his work. His influence extended beyond Italy, the Netherlands and France to countries where he had never been active and lasted well into the eighteenth century.

Most of what is known about Liss today is due to Joachim von Sandrart's highly personal account of the artist, written when he was Liss’s guest in Venice in 1629 (Academie der Bau-, Bild-, und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675, ed. A.R. Pelttzer, Munich, 1925, pp. 187-8). Liss was born in Holstein in the Oldenburg area north of Lübeck, a province that had no strong artistic tradition of its own. Relatively little is known about his origins, but it is presumed that his parents were the painters Johann and Anna Liss, who furnished banners and escutcheons for the dukes of Holstein. It was probably in their workshop that he learned to paint, but it was not until his arrival in Holland around 1615-16 that he became exposed to the international art scene. According to Sandrart, it was in Amsterdam and Haarlem that he first came under the influence of Hendrick Goltzius. Soon, however, he allied himself with younger artists, including Frans Hals, who were paving the way for the future of Dutch painting. Upon his arrival in Antwerp around 1617-18, Liss's paintings began to exhibit an entirely individual character. The influence of the leading artists of Antwerp – Rubens, Jordaens and Abraham Janssens – had a profound and lasting impact on Liss’s art. It was during this period that his propensity to absorb and integrate new artistic impulses into his own style began to emerge. As Rüdiger Klessman points out (op. cit., p. 22), such an impetuous development remains unparalleled, even among the Netherlandish artists of his generation.

Liss did not stay in the Netherlands long. The date of his arrival in Italy is uncertain, but he must have arrived in Venice, via Paris, by 1621. From Venice he went to Rome, where he adopted a completely different manner, seeking new ways to interpret traditional Northern subjects through contact with followers of Caravaggio – particularly Valentin – and artists from the school of the Carracci. He must have stayed in the city for a considerable enough period to be allowed into the Schildersbent, an association of Northern artists active in Rome from around 1623, in which he probably earned himself the sobriquet ‘Pan’ with his Banquet of Soldiers and Courtesans (also known as The Prodigal Son; Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum), the erotic candour of which went beyond all boundaries of convention.

Merry companies such as this recurred throughout Liss’s stylistic development, a genre he had become acquainted with in Haarlem through artists like Willem Buytewech, Esaias van de Velde and Dirck Hals, and continued to develop during his first stay in Venice. While the genre moved from the realm of the sacred to the secular – making it one of the most popular subjects on the art market between 1615 and 1645 – in this composition, Ann Tzeutschler Lurie noted that the picture drew only a fine line ‘between depictions of the prodigal son dissipating his inheritance and scenes of pure genre’ (op. cit., 1975). Indeed, as is customary in such scenes of levity, subtle allusions to vanity and the folly of sensual enjoyment are hidden in the details, which, in combination with the subject of feasting young people, would have reminded contemporary beholders instantly of the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).

In this lavish outdoor setting, young gentry are at play. A courtesan in a red dress sits centre stage, being amorously embraced by the cavalier in a dark-blue suit, considered to be the Prodigal Son. Klessman observed the behaviours of the figure group as symbolic of the five senses, with Hearing suggested by the lute player, Sight by the amorous lovers, Smell by the ablutions of the dog, Taste by the boy pouring a glass of wine and Touch by the fondling couple to the left. Often moralistic and admonitory, Liss also incorporated such symbolism in slightly earlier versions of The Prodigal Son (Vienna, Akademie der bildenden Künste; and the aforementioned painting in Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum), which Klessman considered a further argument in favour of the present picture’s connection to the same biblical parable.

Klessman has dated the present picture to the beginning of Liss’s Roman period, circa 1622-24 (op. cit., p. 138), comparing the courtesan in the red gown to Voluptas in his Decision of Hercules (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen), along with their shared leafy, sunlit trees (ibid., p. 71). Other particulars, like the page serving wine at the right edge of the picture and the guests gazing up at the occupants of the house, are also compared to the Prodigal Son in Vienna (loc. cit.). Tzeutschler Lurie, meanwhile, finds the present picture’s closest stylistic parallels in Liss’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum), with his quick manner of execution, soft modelling and fluid and open brushwork (op. cit., p. 111), dating it to the artist’s second Venetian period, while Richard Spear dates it to his first (op. cit., p. 588). Though it is evidently difficult to arrive at a safe stylistic chronology, the present picture betrays a connection with an earlier Merry Company by the artist, now lost and known only through a copy in the De Young Museum in San Francisco, together with a preparatory drawing in Berlin (Klessman, op. cit., no. D 5).