Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Conscientia mille testes

Brush 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.

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

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

Van Veen Album, folio 26

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).

Inscription:

Inscribed on the album page, below the design, in brown ink, "Conscientia mille testes (title)/ - hic múrus aheneús esto/ Nil conscire sibi, nulla palescere cúlpa" (Be this our wall of bronze, to have no guilt at heart, no wrongdoing to turn us pale). The title is quoted by Quintilian, Book V, 2, line 41. The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 1, lines 60-1.

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. 75-76, no. 138.

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