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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Inexorabile fatum
7 3/16 x 5 7/8 inches (182 x 149 mm)
Brush and gray and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 101
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Notes
Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).
Engraved in reverse, 1607.
Also see records on Van Veen Album (III, 146-157).
Inscriptions/Markings
The inscriber of the quotations on the album pages mistakenly copied the lines pertaining to drawing on Folio 102 and then crossed them out. The text relevant to the present drawing follows immediately. Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, and continuing on the opposite page, "Inexorabile fatúm (title) / Cúm semel occideris, et de te splendida Minos / Fecerit arbitria / Non Torqúate genús, non te facúndia, non te / Restitúet pietas. / Cúncta manús avidas fúgient heredis, amico / Qúa dederis animo. / Infernis neqúe enim tenebris Diana púdicúm / Liberat Hippolitúm" (When once thou has perished and Minos has pronounced on thee his august judgement, not family, Torquatus, nor eloquence, nor righteousness shall restore thee again to life. For Diana releases not the chaste Hippolitus from the nether darkness). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book IV, 7, lines 21-26.
Bibliography
Netherlandish drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Flemish drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library / Felice Stampfle ; with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. New York : The Library, 1991, p. 98, no. 213.
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Century Drawings
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