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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Ne quid ultra vires coneris
7 1/8 x 5 11/16 inches (180 x 145 mm)
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.
Van Veen Album, folio 83
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, "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.
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.
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Century Drawings
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