Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Neglectae religionis poena multiplex

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

7 1/8 x 5 13/16 inches (181 x 147 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 85

Inscription:

There is no inscription on the album page. Opposite the illustration in the 1607 "Emblemata", however, on page 178, are the above title (possibly Van Veen's own words) and the pertinent text: "Delicta maiorum immeritus lues / Romane, donec templa refeceris, / AE deisque labenteis Deorum, et / Foeda nigro simulacra fumo" (Thy fathers' sins, O Roman, thou, though guiltless, shall expiate, till thou dost restore the crumbling temples and shrines of the gods and their statues soiled with grimy smoke). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 6, lines 1-4.

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. 94, no. 197.

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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