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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Mors ultima linea rerum est
7 3/4 x 5 3/4 inches (196 x 146 mm)
Brush and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 102
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
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Mors última linea r[er] úm est (title) / Post labores, artiúm stúdia, dignitates, opes, seqúúntúr / flagella, Dolores, aliaque mala, vitam fugacem exercitantia, / Sola virtús manet súperstes" (The labors, study of arts, honors, and wealth are followed by scourges, suffering, and other evils which trouble fleeting life; only Virtue survives). The title occurs in Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 16, line 79; no source given for the other lines in the 1607 "Emblemata".
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. 214.
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Century Drawings
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