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.

Virtuti sapientia comes

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Virtuti sapientia comes

7 3/16 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 4

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, "Virtúti sapientia comes (title) / Virtutus est vitiúm fugere, et sapientia prima / Stultitia carúisse" (To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 1, lines 41-42.
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. 116.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department