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Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Animi servitus

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Animi servitus

7 1/16 x 5 11/16 inches (179 x 145 mm)
Brush and off-white and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium; incised with the stylus.
Van Veen Album, folio 11

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).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Animi servitús (title)/ Quid refert úri virgis ferrorqúe necari./ Aúctoratús eas, an turpi claúsús in arcâ/ Quo te demisit peccati conscia herilis,/ Contractum genibús tangas caput? Pallida lecto/ Dissiliat múlier, miseram se conscia clamet" (What matters it, whether you go off in bondage, to be scourged and slain with the sword, or whether, shut up in a shameful chest, where the maid, conscious of her mistress's sin, has stowed you away, you touch your crouching head with your knees? That the woman, white as a sheet, will leap away, the maid in league with her cry out in terror). The first four lines are from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 7, lines 58-61; the last two lines are from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 2, lines 129-30.
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. 72, no. 123.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department