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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Medio tutissimus ibis
7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (182 x 146 mm)
Brush and brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark gray tone over a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 6
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 by the artist, within the design below the two female figures, in brown ink, "Prodigalitas" and "Auarititia". (cf. "Auaritia" of Folio 5). On the album page below the design, in another hand, in brown ink, "Medio tutissimús ibis (title) / Dum vitant stúlti vitia in contraria currúnt" (In avoiding vice, fools run into its opposite). The title is from Ovid, "Metamorphoses", Book II, 137. The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 2, line 24.
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. 70, no. 118.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings
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