Allegory of Christian Belief

c. 1622

Medium

pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash; framing lines in pen and black ink

Dimensions

15.3 × 9.4 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-193486

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 souveni…