Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Idem velle atqúe idem nolle./ ea demum firma amicitia est (title)/ Nec túa laúdabis stúdia aut aliena reprendes,/ Nec cúm venari volet ille poëmata panges/ Gratia sic fratrúm geminorúm, Amphionis atqúe/ Zethi dissilúit, donec súspecta severo/ Conticúit lyra, fraternis cessisse pútatúr/ Moribus Amphion" (Again, you will neither praise your own tastes, nor find fault with those of others, nor when your friend will go a-hunting, will you be penning poems. 'Twas so that the brotherly bond between the twins Amphion and Zethus parted asunder, 'til the lyre on which the stern one looked askance was hushed. Amphion, 'tis thought, yielded to his brother's mood). The title is from Sallust's "War with Catiline", Book XX, 4. Although Cicero is given as its author in the 1607 "Emblemata", Sallust's "Catiline" is stated as source in the 1612 edition. The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 18, lines 39-44.
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. 88, no. 180.
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).