Liss' 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. He was, more than any of his contemporaries, a truly European painter. Along with Adam Elsheimer, he was one of the few seventeenth-century German artists capable of stimulating the development of European art. The unusually large number of autograph repetitions attests to the demand for his work; its influence, not only in Italy, the Netherlands and France, but also in countries where he had never been active, most notably in Germany and Austria, 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, made when he was Liss' 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 which had no 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 provided 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 in about 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, such as Frans Hals who were paving the way for the future of Dutch painting. It was not until he arrived in Antwerp in about 1617-18 that he achieved an entirely individual character in his work. The influence of the leading artists of Antwerp - Rubens, Jordaens and Abraham Janssens - had a profound and lasting impact on Liss' 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 as the inscription and date on a drawing in Hamburg attest. From Venice he went to Rome where, according to Sandrart, he 'adopted a completely different manner'. He must have stayed in Rome for a considerable enough period of time to be allowed into the Schilderbent, an association of Northern artists active in Rome from about 1623, and although Sandrart remarks that he soon returned to Venice, there is no record of him there until the year 1629 when his name appears in the lists of the Confraternita dei Pittori. As Klessman points out, after he had settled in Rome, Liss sought new ways to interpret traditional Northern subjects, doing so through contact with followers of Caravaggio - particularly Valentin - and artists from the school of the Carracci. His Banquet of Soldiers and Courtesans (ibid., pp. 79-82, nos. A 15 and A 16) with its erotic candor, went beyond all boundaries of convention, and was probably responsible for the nickname, Pan, under which he entered for membership in the Schilderbent. Klessmann (ibid., p.30) proposes a date of c. 1625 for the artist's departure for Venice, leaving only a short span for his activity in that city. While in Venice Liss fell under the influence of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Fetti and although his late work reflects these influences it contributed, in turn, to the continuation of the tradition of Venetian painting.
Sandrart's remarks concerning Liss' lifestyle are particularly revealing with regard to a better understanding of his artistic output: 'He was in the habit of thinking a long time before he started on his work but once a problem was resolved nothing could make him sway. When we lived together in Venice he would stay away from the house for two or three days and then come back into the room by night, quickly preparing his palette, mixing the colours the way he wanted them and spend the whole night working. In the daytime he would rest a little and then continue with his work for another two or three days and nights. He hardly rested and hardly ate. No matter how many times I told him that he would ruin his health that way and shorten his life, it was no good. He continued that way, staying out several days and several nights - where I do not know - until his purse was empty. Then he continued making the night into day and the day into night.'

The present composition, hitherto known only from a version at Dresden, has been dated by most scholars to before his second Venetian period. Steinbart (Johann Liss, der Maler aus Holstein, Berlin, 1940, pp. 129-30) indicated its formal parallels with Rubens' Magdalen in Vienna. Michael Jaffé (in the catalogue of the exhibition, Jordaens, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 29 Nov. 1968-5 Jan. 1969, p. 73, under no. 7) dates it to the time of Liss' passage through Antwerp, pointing out its relationship with Jordaens' Tempation of the Magdalen of c. 1616. Klessmann (op. cit., p. 84) regards it as a work which was probably painted during the artist's Roman period, where 'the imprint of the Flemish masters remains predominant, especially that of Abraham Janssens, whose characteristic method of composition is recognizable in the Munich Cleopatra as well as in the painting here discussed'. He further justifies the dating by comparing the similarities in the colouring and the handling of the shimmering silk cloths in both pictures. Klessmann also relates the angel in the present composition to that in Liss' Annunciation (and is now only known through an engraving by Abraham Blooteling; Klessmann, op. cit., no. C 60), which probably also dates from the artist's stay in Rome.

The version at Dresden (first recorded in the 1765 catalogue) has always been regarded as the picture mentioned by Boschini in 1660 in the Palazzo Bonfadina, Venice (La Carta Navegar Pitoresco, Venice, 1660, p. 567). This seems likely given the relationship between Francesco Algarotti and Augustus (III) the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, whose collection constitutes the core of the gallery at Dresden. The present picture had probably reached England by the mid-eighteenth century; Klessman, loc. cit, erroneously referred to it as a copy, presumably on the basis of an old reproduction. A life-sized Magdalen by Liss is listed in 1711 in the collection of Siewert van der Schelling in Amsterdam (see A. Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, Maastricht, 1943, I, pp. 153-4), and although both Steinbart and Klessmann speculate that this may refer to a second and different Magdalen composition, perhaps identical with that known only from a copy in Slavkov, The Czech Republic (Klessmann, op. cit., no. D 3, fig. 76), it is possible that it may be identical with the present picture and thus could have been painted while the artist was in The Netherlands. That would therefore make the present picture the primary version and the Dresden picture a later repetition, painted during one of the artist's sojourns in Venice.

Although the picture at Dresden has traditionally been thought to represent Mary Magdalen, no doubt on account of the central figure's voluptuous semi-nudity and skull, the iconography is far from conventional, not least since Mary Magdalen was never martyred. As Klessmann points out (ibid., p. 84) the representation of the saint between angel and temptation is unusual and suggests a wilful fusing of diverse iconographic sources by the artist; the subject's relationship to genre scenes of matchmaking popular in the Netherlands since the sixteenth century is obvious (see, for instance, an engraving by Jan Saenredam after Goltzius, The Choice between Young and Old, Hollstein; J. Matham, no. 330). The intention here appears to be to represent the protagonist between the temptations of this world, symbolized by material riches, and the rewards of the next, symbolized by the palm being proffered by the angel. In essence, it is a Christian treatment of the classical choice of Hercules, and, as in pictures of that subject, Virtue is preferred to Vice