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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Virtus immortalis
7 5/16 x 5 3/4 inches (187 x 147 mm)
Brush and off-white oil, and pen and dark 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 3
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, "Virtús immortalis (title)/ Virtús recludens immeritis mori / coelum negata tentat iter via / coetusque vulgares, et udam / spernit humúm fugiente pennâ" (True worth opening heaven wide for those deserving not to die, essays its course by a path denied to others, and spurns the vulgar crowd and damp earth on fleeting pinion). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 2, lines 21-24; not from Book III, 4, as cited in the 1612 "Emblemata".
Bibliography
Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 69, no. 115.
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