Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Ne quid ultra vires coneris

Brush and gray and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium; incised with the stylus.

7 1/8 x 5 11/16 inches (180 x 145 mm)

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.

Van Veen Album, folio 83

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Ne quid últra vires coneris (title) / Vis consilii expers mole rúit suâ, / Vim temperatam Dii quoque provehúnt / in majús, iidem oderê vires / Omne nefas animo moventes" (Brute force bereft of wisdom falls to ruin by its own weight. Power with counsel tempered, even the gods make greater. But might that in its soul is bent on all impiety, they hate). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 4, lines 65-68.

Provenance:

Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), London and Florence; from whom purchased through Galerie Alexandre Imbert, Rome, in 1909 by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), New York (no mark; see Lugt 1509); his son, J. P. Morgan, Jr. (1867-1943), New York.

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. 93, no. 195.

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).

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