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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Sapientiae libertas
7 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 147 mm)
Brush and gray 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.
Van Veen Album, folio 38
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, "Sapientiae libertas (title) / Qúisnam igitúr liber? Sapiens sibi qúi imperiosús / Qúem neque pauperies, neque mors neqúe vincula terrent, / Responsare cúpidinibús, contemnere honores. / Fortis et in se ipso totús teres atqúe rotúndis / Externi ne qúid valeat per laeve morari / In qúem manca rúit semper fortúna" (Who then is free? The wise man, who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who bravely defies his passions, and scorns ambition, who in himself is a whole, smoothed and rounded, so that nothing from outside can rest on the polished surface, and against whom Fortune in her mindset is ever maimed). The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book II, 7, lines 83-88.
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. 79, no. 150.
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Century Drawings
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