The Fall of Phaeton, c.1620/25 by Johann Liss
Canvas Print - 23233-LIJ

Headfirst he comes, arms flung wide, a pale body tumbling through a roiling column of scorched cloud. Phaeton's fall occupies the upper centre of the canvas like a lit fuse, and everything else in the picture responds to it – recoils, points, gestures, collapses. Johann Liss has staged Ovid's disaster as pure kinetic theatre.

The three water nymphs at the lower left are the emotional engine of the scene. Liss arranges them almost like a sculptor's demonstration piece, showing the female nude from front, back, and three-quarter turn, their limbs interlocking as they clutch one another. One flings her arm upward in horror, her drapery whipping behind her in a dark, almost inky arc. That fabric was originally sea-green – the pigment has darkened over the centuries into something closer to bitumen – but you can still read its swirl as an extension of her panic, a painted gust of feeling.

Flesh is where Liss lavishes his real attention. The paint is thick, loosely dragged, warm with pinks and creams that catch what little sun remains. You can sense the Flemish training behind those bodies – there is Rubens in the softness of the hips and shoulders – but also the Venetian air he breathed while working in Italy in the late 1620s. Titian's grand mythologies stand somewhere behind this canvas, filtered through a younger, more nervous sensibility.

On the right, perched on a rocky spur, Phaeton's sisters the Heliades echo the nymphs' distress in miniature, their small winged bodies leaning into the disaster. Below them, the river god Eridanus reclines with his white beard and heavy limbs, waiting to receive the falling boy. Water tumbles behind him in ribbons of white impasto, and one can almost hear its rush against the boulders – a cool sound cutting through the heat of the burning sky.

That sky is the picture's other protagonist. Sulphurous orange bleeds into slate and umber, a Baroque storm cloud pushed to operatic pitch. A wedge of clear blue survives at the left, which only sharpens the violence overhead. Compositionally, Liss binds the whole thing with a long diagonal from Phaeton's plunging body down through the nymphs to the river god's outstretched leg – catastrophe made legible as a single sweeping line.

Joachim von Sandrart, who met the painter in Venice around 1628, praised precisely this: the terror-struck nymphs, the flaming clouds, the charm of the landscape. Standing in front of The Fall of Phaeton at the National Gallery in London, you feel the justice of that praise. Liss died young, barely into his thirties, and pictures like this one make the loss sting. Perhaps what lingers most is the strange tenderness of the nymphs' bodies against so much cosmic violence – warm skin at the edge of an ending world.