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).
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Qúis dives? qúi nil cupit (title) / Latius regnes avidúm domando / Spiritum, qúam si Libyam remotis / Gadibús júngas, et úterqúe Poenus / Serviat uni / Redditam Cyri solio Phraatem / Dissidens plebi, número beato = / rum, eximit virtús, popúlúmque falsis / Dedocet uti / Vocibus, regnum et diadema tutum / Deferens úni, propriamqúe laúrúm / Qúisquis ingentes, ocúlo irretorto / Spectat ácervos" (Thou shalt not rule a broader realm by subduing a greedy heart than shouldst thou join Libya to distant Gades, and should Punic settlers on both sides of the Strait become subjects of a single lord. Though Phraates has been restored to the throne of Cyrus, yet Virtue, dissenting from the rabble, will not admit him to the number of the happy, and teaches the folk to discard wrong names, conferring power, the secure diadem, and lasting laurels on him alone who can gaze upon huge piles of treasure without casting an envious glance behind). The title is a quotation from Brias of Priene, one of Seven Wise Men of Greece. The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 2, lines 9-12, 17-24.
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. 79, no. 149.