Venus and Tannhäuser

mythological

Tannhuser (died after 1265) was a German Minnesnger and poet. He was an active courtier at the court of Frederick II of Austria (1230-1246), and the Codex Manesse (1340) depicts him clad in the Teutonic Order habit, suggesting he might have fought the Fifth Crusade (1213-21) Tannhuser became the subject of legend, first attested in 1430, propagated in ballads from 1450. The legendary account makes Tannhuser a knight and poet who found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess.

Loading map…

About the Artist

Sándor Liezen-mayer

1839 – 1898

Hungarian painter. He studied at Carl Rahl in Vienna and Munich in 1857 where he began painting romantic historic pictures in Piloty 's style. Due to his harmonic colouring and well-balanced composition, the illustrations for Goethe's Faust, Schiller's Bandits and Das Lied von der Glocke, brought him a lot of success. In 1870 he was invited to paint the portrait of Emperor Franz Josef in Vienna. After the years 1880-83, when he was the director of the Stuttgart Academy, he returned to Munich where he worked as a teacher in the art school. His major pictures: St. Elizabeth of Hungary (painted in two, almost identical versions), Queen Elisabeth Signs the Death Sentence of Mary Stuart, Venus and Tannhäuser, and Faust and Marguerite.

View all works →