Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Sic vivamus ut mortem non metuamus

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Sic vivamus ut mortem non metuamus

7 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (180 x 147 mm)
Brush and off-white and light brown 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; incised with the stylus.
Van Veen Album, folio 93

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).
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Sic vivamús út mortem non metúamús (title) / Eheú fugaces Postúme, Postume / Labúntúr anni, nec pietas moram / Rúgis, aút instanti senectae / Afferet, indomitaeque morti" (Alas, O Postumus, Postumus, the years glide swiftly by, nor will righteousness give pause to wrinkles, to advancing age, or Death invincible). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 14, lines 1-4.
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. 96, no. 205.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department