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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Conscientia mille testes
7 1/8 x 5 13/16 inches (181 x 147 mm)
Brush and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a red-brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 26
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, "Conscientia mille testes (title)/ - hic múrus aheneús esto/ Nil conscire sibi, nulla palescere cúlpa" (Be this our wall of bronze, to have no guilt at heart, no wrongdoing to turn us pale). The title is quoted by Quintilian, Book V, 2, line 41. The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 1, lines 60-1.
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. 75-76, no. 138.
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Century Drawings
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