Johann Liss about 1595–1631
NG 4597 
Judith in the Tent of Holofernes

Susan Foister, 2024

Extracted from:
Susan Foister; with Rachel Billinge, Marika Spring and Lea Viehweger; and contributions by Lorne Campbell and Allison Goudie, The German Paintings before 1800 (London: National Gallery Global and Yale University Press, 2024).

Oil on canvas, 128.2 × 103.7 cm

Provenance

A painting of Judith and Holofernes by Liss is first recorded in inventories of the Venetian family of Vidmani (Widmann) in 1659 as ‘Giuditta ed Oloferne del Gio. Lis’, along with three other works by Liss; it hung in the ‘camera che guarda verso il ponte che va in birri’ of the Palazzo Widmann.¹ An engraving by Pietro Monaco of 1739 of a Judith and Holofernes by Liss, very similar in appearance to NG 4597 (fig. 1), names the owner of the engraved subject as the Venetian family of Vidmani.² The painting recurs in inventories of the family made in 1808.³ The painting after which the engraving was made may well be identical with NG 4597 (see Attribution, below).

NG 4597 was before 1914 in the collection of Professor Franz Naager (1870–1942), the Munich artist and collector who spent from 1901 to 1913 in Venice, as a work by Fetti; according to John Archibald Watt Dollar it was placed on loan to the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.⁴ In 1914 it was published by Naager and by R. Oldenbourg as a work by Liss.⁵ It was purchased by the veterinarian John Archibald Watt Dollar (1866–1947) in 1919; he unsuccessfully offered the work for sale to the Gallery as well as to the Louvre in 1920, but presented it to the National Gallery in 1931.⁶

Copies and Versions

• (1) Szépművészeti Museum, Budapest, oil on canvas, 129 × 104 cm (fig. 2).⁷

• (2) Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on canvas, 126 × 102 cm (fig. 3).⁸

• (3) Formerly Venice, Italico Brass collection, oil on canvas, 112 × 88 cm.⁹

• (4) Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, oil on canvas, 120 × 172 cm (fig. 4).¹⁰

• (5) Partial copy, London art market.¹¹

• (6) Copy, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, oil on canvas, 102 × 108 cm.¹²

• (7) Copy, John Law, Venice, 1729.¹³

• (8) Private collection, Budapest, oil on canvas, 121 × 96 cm.¹⁴

• (9) Copy, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, pen drawing on paper, 12.8 × 10.5 cm.¹⁵

Engravings

Pietro Monaco, 1739, inscribed ‘Pittura di Giovanni Lys, posseduta dalla nobil famiglia Vidiman a S. Cantiano’ (fig. 1).¹⁶

Exhibitions

Augsburg and Cleveland 1975 (A19);¹⁷ Vienna 2006 (no catalogue); Rome 2020–1 (15).

Technical Notes

The painting is in generally good condition, but there are some small losses, on the right below Judith’s right hand, in Judith’s foot, above her left hand and in Holofernes’ left shoulder. There is also damage down both sides where the picture had been made narrower at some point in its past (see below). There are some areas of wear, most apparent in Judith’s face, her white blouse and in the grey background. The painting was relined, cleaned and restored in 1971–2.

The support is a single piece of plain (tabby) weave canvas. There is marked cusping all round. At the top and bottom unpainted edges (but with the ground on them) are tacked to the sides of the stretcher. At the sides, about 2.5 cm of the original painted surface had in the past been turned over a stretcher to make tacking edges (see fig. 8). This original paint was restored to the front when the painting was relined in 1971. The appearance of the series of cusped arcs of the weave along the sides, with associated holes very close to the edge, suggests that the canvas may have been stretched flat on a loom while it was being painted.

Sampling revealed a red‐brown ground containing red earth mixed with a small amount of black and red lead. Infrared reflectography showed no underdrawing, but revealed some changes made during painting (fig. 7). Some are visible, for example, in the area of Judith’s hand and in the sword, but their exact nature and form is not clear (fig. 5). The X‐radiograph provides no further information on this point.

Analysis of the medium from two samples indicated that linseed oil had been used in the black paint of the helmet, while walnut oil had been used for the white sheet behind [page 477] [page 478] [page 479] the body.¹⁸ Some larch resin (Venetian turpentine) was also present in the sample of black paint. An additional sample from the lighter grey paint in the opening of the tent at the top edge was analysed by GC–MS to investigate whether walnut oil might have been used in another light‐coloured paint passage, but heat‐bodied linseed oil was instead identified.¹⁹

The yellow highlights on Judith’s drapery are painted with lead‐tin yellow. The blue feather of Holofernes’ helmet consists of azurite mixed with lead white. The blood on the sheet around Holofernes’ body is painted with red lake.

Subject and Sources

The story of Judith and Holofernes is told in the Apocryphal Book of Judith (13: 1–12).²⁰ The Assyrian forces, commanded by their general Holofernes, were besieging the Israelite city of Bethulia. Judith, a pious and chaste Israelite widow, upon witnessing the city’s suffering decided to take action, and – dressing in her finest clothes – left for Holofernes’ camp accompanied by her maid. Holofernes believed Judith’s assertions that she wanted to help him in his quest to conquer Bethulia and, besotted with her beauty and eloquence, invited her to stay. On the third night of Judith’s stay Holofernes resolved to seduce or rape Judith and for this purpose invited her to a banquet. However, Holofernes drank copiously, and when he became unconscious in his tent alone with Judith, the widow took her chance: she decapitated the inebriated commander with his own sword in two strokes. As proof of her deed, Judith and her maid hurriedly packed the severed head and a golden canopy from his tent and rushed back to Bethulia.²¹ At dawn the Assyrian army discovered the death of their commander by the hands of a Jewish woman and scattered in panic: the city was saved. While the victorious Bethulians celebrated Judith’s feat, the widow rejected the many offers of marriage she received and retired to her previous life of celibacy.

Judith is shown crouching or kneeling, her back to the viewer, but her head is turned to engage our gaze directly. Her right foot is thrust out behind her. She wears a white and red turban (Judith 10: 3) around her head, from which some dark ringlets escape in front of her ear (fig. 6). Her white chemise, edged with black lace, exposes the upper part of her back, while around the lower part of her body are swathed loose draperies in glinting gold, blue and in a red patterned damask‐like fabric. Her right hand, concealed behind her back but exposed to the viewer, holds a sword, its hilt decorated with a parrot (fig. 9), while in her left hand is a tuft of dark hair from the severed head of Holofernes which is largely hidden, although the white of his eye appears to be indicated just below her sleeve. Immediately to the left of Judith’s head, juxtaposed with it, is the head of a Black servant, the maidservant who traditionally forms part of the depiction of the story of Judith. She wears a brown [page 480] [page 481] [page 482] turban, and, eyes turned up to Judith, is ready to receive the severed head in a brown sack which she holds open. The body of Holofernes, clad in a white sheet, lies thrust towards the viewer in the lower left‐hand corner, its severed neck spouting blood, its lifeless right hand covered in gore juxtaposed with the flexed sole of Judith’s foot. The neck appears to show evidence of two attempts to sever the head (fig. 16).²² In the background are grey draperies evidently intended for the tent of Holofernes, on the right drawn back like curtains. Behind the maidservant a gap in the drapes indicates a tent opening through which pale morning light is visible. Holofernes’ possessions are strewn throughout the tent, in the background on the right a round shield is dimly visible, and a bow with its string undone hangs above it. In the lower left corner are pieces of Holofernes’ armour: a shoulder and breast plate, and a blue plume, possibly the decoration of a helmet.

The drama and violence of the subject matter was appealing to artists of the early seventeenth century, particularly those such as Liss who had come under the influence of Caravaggio in Rome in the early 1620s (see biography, p. 469). It has been suggested that Liss was primarily inspired by a painting by Rubens, now known only from an engraving (fig. 11), which he may have seen in Antwerp in 1615–19.²³ Rubens in turn had taken inspiration from Elsheimer’s Judith slaying Holofernes of about 1601–3, which he owned (fig. 12).²⁴ In both these compositions the body of Holofernes is thrust towards the viewer, at right angles to the picture plane, in a manner similar to the position of the body in Liss’s composition, but whereas in Elsheimer’s painting Judith raises her sword above her head, in that of Rubens Judith is shown at the moment of slicing directly through Holofernes’ neck, severing the head. Both painters must have known the equally dramatic depiction by Caravaggio of 1595–6 (fig. 13) where the latter moment is also vividly portrayed, but Holofernes, clearly alive, is shown parallel to the picture plane, the surprise and agony of his face shockingly confronting the viewer. Liss might also have known the arresting renderings of this subject by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or later), both her earlier representations of the violent killing of Holofernes (Florence and Naples), as well as the later composition (Detroit) in which the painter chose to focus on the figures of Judith and her maidservant in the moment immediately after the death of Holofernes, and which was made at Rome in 1623–5, the period when Liss is highly likely to have been working there too.²⁵

Liss has chosen to depict the slightly later and more conventional episode in the drama, that of Judith’s consignment of the head of Holofernes to the sack, but in an entirely novel manner: his presentation of the subject is both striking and original, demonstrating the full extent of his [page 483] [page 484] abilities as a painter. Although the way in which he presents Holofernes’ body with its gory severed neck tilting directly towards the viewer may reflect inspiration from Rubens or Elsheimer, the brutality of the treatment of Holofernes, as well as the drama of the deployment of light and shadow, must surely take inspiration from contemporary or near contemporary work in Rome. Moreover, Liss’s composition is very different from the way in which Rubens and Elsheimer and, to a lesser extent, Caravaggio, arrange their compositions around the vertical of the upright figure of Judith. While the sharply angled body of Holofernes recedes into space, the arc of his brightly lit arms standing out from the strong shadow cast over his torso, Judith’s dominant figure, her coloured drapery glinting with light, bends over the body of her enemy: together the figures form a complex interweaving of curving shapes in space which are subordinate to the tracing of a single large sweeping arc from Judith’s head to that of Holofernes. Despite the fact that Liss does not show Judith in action, it is the shocking sight of the headless trunk thrust towards the viewer in dramatic juxtaposition with the more distant but direct and challenging gaze of his female assassin, her turbaned head twisted towards us, which makes the sense of the violence which has just taken place most vivid and draws the viewer in as though to witness it directly. The concentrated composition of Liss’s picture, the back view of Judith combined with her forward, complicit, even challenging glance, adds greatly to the sense of drama and urgency.²⁶

Liss’s close compositional focus, thrusting the imposing figure of Judith towards the viewer, makes striking use of the unusual pose of his heroine. In the engraving after Rubens Judith is shown sideways, at a slight angle, her drapery slipping from her shoulder, but the broad back of Liss’s Judith is more reminiscent of the heroic dimensions of that of Rubens’s sleeping Samson in the National Gallery (NG 6461), commissioned in 1609–10 for the house of Nicolaas Rockox (1560–1640) in Antwerp. Klessmann drew attention to a fourth composition of the same subject by Artemisia Gentileschi (Uffizi) of 1614–15, in which Judith’s maid is both shown from the back and, daringly, made the central figure (fig. 10), as well as to Guido Reni’s fresco for the oratory of San Andrea in San Gregorio Magno al Celio in Rome, painted in 1608, where there is a similarly turbaned female figure also shown from the back and glancing at the viewer (fig. 14).²⁷ Steinbart mentioned the similarities with a painting of Judith by Giovanni Antonio Pordenone (about 1483/4–1539) in the Galleria Borghese, which Levey notes was recorded as a Titian in 1682, and was therefore likely to have merited contemporary attention.²⁸ To these possible precedents and sources of inspiration might be added the painting of Judith and Holofernes by Vasari (St Louis Museum of Art), where Judith is shown from the back, her right arm raised for the slaughter, as well as the long tradition in both northern and southern Europe of figures in narratives and portraits shown from the back but glancing at the viewer.²⁹ It is also notable in this context that the painting of Tomyris by the German artist Georg Pencz (about 1500–1550) of about 1541 (Zagreb, Mimara Museum) shows the largely naked Queen of Scythia from the back glancing round at the viewer as she places the head of the Persian king Cyrus in a wine‐skin.³⁰ Within Liss’s own oeuvre, Klessmann has drawn attention to the compositional connections with a drawing by Liss (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle) of David holding the head of Goliath, in which David is also shown from the back.³¹

While Liss’s Judith is partly clad, unlike Pencz’s Tomyris, his depiction of the scene differs decidedly from the paintings by Pordenone, Artemisia Gentileschi and even Rubens in the sensuality of the female protagonist. Uppenkamp has highlighted the erotic tones of NG 4597 and placed the iconography of Liss’s Judith in the context of the northern European ‘Power of Women’ topos.³² Often created as series of prints, Power of Women images illustrated how powerful men were deceived into their undoing by the wiles of beautiful women, and drew on the stories of Samson and Delilah, Aristotle and Phyllis, and in some cases Judith and Holofernes.³³ Judith was a popular and divisive biblical heroine. She provided a rare example of a woman acting upon God’s will herself, and by means of her visual appearance and eloquence deceiving a man, finally killing him with his own sword.³⁴ While her act was considered heroic, the murder of a man was also perceived as highly inappropriate for a woman.³⁵

Judith’s act, even if it freed her people from tyranny, was only deemed acceptable because it was committed by a woman who lived piously and chastely, a choice of life that (according to commentators since Saint Jerome) endowed her with male qualities.³⁶ The text of the Book of Judith itself [page 485] ensures there is no room for any doubt about the nature of Judith’s three‐day stay in Holofernes’ camp; upon her return to Bethulia, Judith emphasised: ‘… my face deceived him to his undoing, and he wrought no deed of sin with me to defile or cause me shame.’³⁷ However, this aspect of Judith’s story was explored and interrogated in particular by German artists of the sixteenth century such as the brothers Sebald (1500–1550) and Barthel Beham (1502–1540) who depicted the heroine in sensual and openly erotic ways, casting doubt on her chastity and by extension on the permissibility of her deadly action.³⁸ Doing so changed the interpretation of her act from heroically freeing her people to seducing and murdering a man, in a manner comparable to Delilah’s deceit of Samson.³⁹ Sebald Beham’s engraving of Judith and her Maidservant provides one such example of Judith reinterpreted as murderous seductress (fig. 15).⁴⁰ He depicts Judith completely naked, while her maidservant is thinly clad. Judith, seen from the side, strides forward. Her left arm is raised high as she holds Holofernes’ severed head by his hair, and her head is turned over her left shoulder to gaze backwards. Liss, who was acquainted with Sebald Beham’s engravings, appears to have taken some inspiration from Beham’s Judith.⁴¹ In Barthel Beham’s engraving of 1525 Judith is depicted naked and seated on the body of Holofernes in a manner that strongly foreshadows Liss’s composition.⁴²

Liss’s interpretation of Judith, probably informed by the prints of the Behams and others similarly daring, plays with the ambivalence in Judith’s story rather than simply representing her as a strong and beautiful heroine. Liss’s Judith is shown kneeling on Holofernes’ bedstead in an intimately enclosed setting. Her feet are bare, the sandals she is said to have worn presumably removed,⁴³ and her revealing shift and draped clothes appear to be held in place mainly by the blue scarf, the ends of which seem trapped underneath Holofernes’ heavy body. The choice of yellow for the main part of her robe might suggest a reference to the colour worn by prostitutes.⁴⁴ As Uppenkamp observed, her position seems to suggest she has just released herself from Holofernes’ embrace, in order to kill him.⁴⁵ The sword is not openly raised as in Pordenone’s or Artemisia Gentileschi’s versions, for instance, but concealed behind her back, indicating betrayal rather than victory.⁴⁶ Thus Liss subverts Judith’s traditional attribute, which otherwise sets her apart from Tomyris and, importantly, from the seductress Salome and associates her with the figure of justice. Liss’s unusual variation of the subject, combining Italian visual formulae with northern European iconography, must have been well received judging by the many versions surviving today.

Attribution and Date

NG 4597 was attributed to Domenico Fetti (1589–1623) when acquired by Franz Naager, presumably during his sojourn in Venice in 1901–13, and identified by Naager and by Oldenbourg in 1914 as the work of Liss (see Provenance). Klessmann noted that some paintings by Fetti were mistaken for works by Liss as early as the seventeenth century as well as subsequently.⁴⁷ However, he also states ‘it is noteworthy that most Liss paintings recorded in eighteenth‐century collections were, at the time, also given their correct attributions’.⁴⁸ The National Gallery painting is one of several versions of this subject associated with Liss (see Copies and Versions). Technical studies have not revealed any major compositional changes during the course of painting that would testify to its primacy among the versions, but infrared reflectography has shown some alterations to Judith’s right hand which grips the sword (see Technical Notes), although these are hard to interpret (fig. 5).

It has generally been accepted since the monographic exhibition in 1975 that NG 4597 is by Liss himself. In the catalogue of that exhibition Klessmann argued that no other version equalled the National Gallery painting in quality: ‘it can therefore be assumed that this is the artist’s primary version’, an opinion he later confirmed.⁴⁹ Rowlands in 1975 maintained that the exhibition made clear that the National Gallery picture was superior in quality to other known versions of the subject and must be Liss’s primary and possibly only rendering of the subject, but believed that the Vienna version [page 486] (fig. 3) might also be an autograph work; he thought the Budapest version (fig. 2) was a copy.⁵⁰ Levey noted that the version in Vienna, prior to 1807 in the collection of the Archbishop of Salzburg, was recorded in 1870 as a copy; he considered the painting in Budapest to be a version of good quality.⁵¹ The Budapest painting was cleaned in 1993, the result suggesting it might be an autograph work, and it has also been associated with the Widmann painting; however, its provenance can be traced only to 1916, when it was presented by Erno Kammerer, director of the Szépművészeti Museum between 1906 and 1914.⁵²

Levey considered that the Ca’ Rezzonico version (fig. 4), with its landscape format showing the moon in the night sky on the right, had been extended; even without this he doubted the painting was by Liss himself.⁵³ Spear and Rowlands believed it to date from the following century.⁵⁴ More recently Pedrocco has noted that after conservation work in 1989 the right‐hand part of the composition including the moon in the night sky no longer appeared to be an extension; he further suggested the painting, given to the collections of the Musei Civici Veneziani in 1950 by the heirs of the Conte Volpi who owned the Grimani‐Calergi Palace from 1936 to 1947, might be identical with a painting of Judith and Holofernes listed in the inventory of Vincenzo Grimani Calergi’s possessions in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi in Venice on 2 February 1647, ‘Un Giudit con la testa d’Oloferne con sue cornise di noghera e pochi adornamenti indorati’ (‘A Judith with the head of Holofernes in a walnut frame with some gilded decoration’) (see Copies and Versions).⁵⁵ If the landscape to the right of the Ca’ Rezzonico version is indeed an original and integral element of the composition as now contended, rather than an addition as previously thought, it could not be the version engraved in 1739 (see Provenance, and below). The Widmann painting was not however the only painting of Judith by Liss recorded in Venice at this period: another, possibly a copy, was recorded in 1729 in the collection of John Law.⁵⁶

If NG 4597 is, as asserted by most modern scholars, Liss’s original rather than a secondary version or copy, then it is likely to be that identical with the painting recorded in the inventories of 1659 and 1808, and in the engraving by Pietro Monaco published in 1739, after a Judith and Holofernes by Liss in the collection of the Vidman, Widman [page 487]or Widmann family in Venice (fig. 1; see Provenance).⁵⁷ The engraving shows a composition similar to that of the National Gallery painting and the other versions attributed to Liss. Since the inscription on the engraving mentions that its subject was owned by the Vidman or Widmann family, the engraved painting must be the work mentioned in the Vidman inventory of 1659 as ‘Giuditta ed Oloferne del Gio. Lis’ along with other paintings by Liss and must have remained in the Vidman family collection until at least 1808, when it is again recorded in an inventory. It is likely that it remained in family hands until the death of the last surviving member of the family, Giovanni Abondio Vidman, in 1878. As it hung in the Palazzo Widmann, it may originally have been commissioned or acquired by Liss’s Venetian contemporary, Hans or Giovanni Widmann (died 1634) a wealthy merchant from a German family originally of Augsburg who came to Venice from Villach in Carinthia, Austria in 1586; conceivably it might already have been in the Palazzo Widmann, then owned by Paulo Sarotti, a wealthy citizen and sugar merchant who rented it to Giovanni from 1627 and whose widow sold it to his family in 1637, according to the instructions left in his will of 24 September 1630, in which he referred to his wish to buy it if it became available at a reasonable price and recorded that the palace was well furnished (‘fornita di mobilia onorevolmente’); or it may well have been acquired at a slightly later date, along with the other works by Liss recorded there in 1659, by one of Giovanni’s sons, the collector Lodovico Widmann (1611–1674) (see Provenance).⁵⁸ None of the surviving versions of the painting can be connected with the Vidman family, or can be shown with certainty even to have been in Venice throughout the nineteenth century (with the possible exception of the Ca’ Rezzonico version with its landscape); the National Gallery painting’s known history indicates only that it is likely to have been there at least in the latter part of the century (see Provenance).

It is evident that Liss’s composition demonstrates the strong influence of his time in Rome in the early 1620s as well as that of the Venetian brushwork he must have studied in the work of Fetti and earlier painters such as Titian and Tintoretto, as Sandrart recorded. Klessmann saw in NG 4597 a reflection of Flemish compositions combined with the influence of the followers of Caravaggio such as Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622) and Nicolas Regnier (1590–1667).⁵⁹ He dated the picture to Liss’s stay in Rome in about 1623­–6, suggesting it was contemporary with Liss’s more Flemish Cleopatra in Munich which he dated to around 1624; both involve three figures and in both the heroine wears a similar white shift.⁶⁰ Levey cited Steinbart’s view that the painting’s ‘tenebrist lighting’ might suggest a dating of about 1624–5 ‘after Liss had returned from Venice to Rome’.⁶¹ Christensen has suggested a date of 1624–6 for both NG 4597 and the Temptation of Mary Magdalene (New York, Metropolitan Museum), emphasising Liss’s dynamic engagement in these two paintings with the psychological and spatial innovation evident in both painting and sculpture in Rome at this time, but suggesting the latter might have been painted in Venice.⁶² If NG 4597 was made for the Widmann family in Venice, or even the previous owner of their palace, then the presumption would be that it too was made in Venice and must date from the latter 1620s, although the date when Liss returned to Venice from Rome remains unclear (see biography, p. 469); possibly he even sold paintings to Venetian buyers when he was in Rome.⁶³ The numbers of versions of the painting testify to its success and its composition influenced the work of other painters: Klessman pointed to its impact on Judith compositions by Pietro Vecchia (1603–1678) and Mattia Preti (1613–1699).⁶⁴

Select Bibliography

Levey 1959, pp. 58–9; Klessmann in Klessmann and Tzeuschler Lurie 1975, pp. 90–2, no. A19; Klessmann 1986, pp. 192–3; Klessmann 1999, pp. 57–8, 114, 128–9, no. 7; Uppenkamp 2004, pp. 78–84.

Notes