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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Philosophia vitae magistra
7 1/4 x 5 7/8 inches (184 x 150 mm)
Brush and light brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a red-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 20
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, "Philosophia vitae magistra (title) / Inter cúncta leges et percúnctabere doctos, / Qúa ratione queas traducere leviter aevum. / Ne te semper inops agitet vexetqúe cúpido / Ne pavor, et rerúm mediocriter útiliúm, spes. / Virtútem doctrina paret natúrane donet / Qúid minúat cúras, qúid te tibi reddat amicúm" (Amid all this you must read and question the wise, how you may be able to pass your days in tranquility. Is greed, ever penniless, to drive and harass you, or fears and hopes about things that profit little? Does wisdom beget virtue, or Nature bring her as a gift? What will lessen care? What will make you a friend of yourself?). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 18, lines 96-101,
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. 74, no. 132.
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Century Drawings
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