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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Minerva duce
7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 146 mm)
Brush and light brown and gray oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.
Van Veen Album, folio 21
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, "Minerva dúce (title) / Est qúodam prodire tenús, si non datúr últra. / Fervet avaritia miseroqúe cupidine pectús, / Súnt verba et voces, qúibus húnc lenire dolorem / Possis, et magnum morbi deponere partem. / Laúdis amore túmes, sunt certa piacúla, quae te / Ter purè lecto poterúnt recreare libello" (It is worth while to take some steps forward, though we may not go still further. Is your bosom fevered with avarice and sordid covetousness? There are spells and sayings whereby you may soothe pain and cast much of the malady aside. Are you swelling with ambition? There are fixed charms that can fashion you anew, if with cleansing rites you read the booklet thrice). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 1, lines 32-37.
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. 133.
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Century Drawings
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