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

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

Animi servitus perpetua

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Animi servitus perpetua

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)
Brush and off-white and gray 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 12

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 perpetúa (title)/ Evasti? credo metúes doctusqúe cavebis:/ Quares quando iterum paveas, iterúmque perire/ Possis, o toties servús! quae bellua ruptis/ Cúm semel effúgit reddit se prava catenis" (Suppose you have escaped: then, I take it, you will be afraid and cautious after your lesson. No, you will seek occasion so as again to be in terror, again to face ruin, O you slave many times over! But what beast, having once burst its bonds and escaped, perversely returned to them again?). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 7, lines 68-71.
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. 124.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department