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.

Festina lente

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Festina lente

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 146 mm)
Brush and gray oil, and pen and brown ink, with off-white opaque watercolor; 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 31

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, "Festina lentè (title)/ - ridiculum acri/ Fortiús et meliús magnas plerúmqúe secat res" (Jesting oft cuts hard knots more forcefully and effectively than gravity). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 10, lines 14-15.
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. 77, no. 143.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department