Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen
1556-1629
Innocentia ubique tuta
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; incised with a stylus.
7 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (183 x 146 mm)
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) in 1909.
Van Veen Album, folio 33
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, "Innocentia úbiqúe túta (title) / Integer vitae, scelerisqúe púrús, / Non eget Maúri jacúlis, nec arcú, / Nec venenatis gravidâ sagittis / Fúsce pharetrâ / Sive per syrtes iter aestuosas / Sive factúrús per inhospitalem / Caúcasum, vel qúae loca fabulosus / Lambit Hydaspes" (He who is upright in his way of life and unstained by guilt, needs not Moorish darts nor bow nor quiver loaded with poisoned arrows, Fuscus, whether his way shall be through the sweltering Syrtes or the cheerless Caucasus or the regions that storied Hydaspes waters). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book I, 22, lines 1-8. Aristius Fuscus was Horace's friend, the dramatic writer and scholar, to whom Epistle I, 10 is addressed.

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. 78, no. 145.

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