Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Mentis inquietudo

Brush and light brown and off-white oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a dark brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium.

7 1/4 x 5 3/4 inches (185 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 43

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, "Mentis inqúietúdo (title) / Non enim gazae, neqúe consúlaris / Súmmovet lictor miseros túmúltús / Mentis et curas, laqúeata circum, / Tecta volantes" (For 'tis not treasure nor even the consul's lictor that can banish the wretched tumults of the soul and the cares that flit about the paneled ceilings). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 16, lines 9-12; not Book II, 26, as indicated in the 1607 "Emblemata".

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. 81, no. 155.

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