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, "Post múlta virtús opera laxari solet (title) / Sperat infestis, metúit secúndis, / Alteram sortem, benè praeparatum / Pectús, informes hyemes reoúit [reducit] / Júpiter idem / Súmmovet, non si malè núnc et olim / Sic erit, quondam cytharâ tacentem / Súscitat Músam, neqúe semper arcúm / Tendit Apollo. / Rebus angustis animosus atque / Fortis appare, sapienter idem, / Contrahes vento nimiúm secúndo, / Turgida vela" (Hopeful in adversity, anxious in prosperity, is the heart that is well prepared for weal or woe. Though Jupiter brings back the unlovely winters, he also takes them away. If we fare ill today, 'twill not be ever so. At times Apollo wakes with the lyre his slumbering song, and does not always stretch the bow. In time of stress show thyself bold and valiant! Yet wisely reef thy sails when they are swollen by too fair a breeze!). According to the 1607 "Emblemata", the title is owed to Seneca, but without any specific source. However, the 1612 edition cites it as a quotation from Seneca's tragedy, "Hercules furens", line 476. The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book II, 10, lines 13-24.
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. 91, no. 189.