Otto van Veen

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Otto van Veen

1556-1629

Potestas potestati subjecta

Brush and gray 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 1/8 x 5 3/4 inches (180 x 146 mm)

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

Van Veen Album, folio 36

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, "Potestas potestati subjecta (title) / Regúm timendorum in proprios greges / Reges in ipsos, imperium est Jovis / Clari Giganteo triumpho / Cúncta supercilio moventis" (The rule of dreaded kings is over their own peoples; but over the kings themselves is the rule of Jove, glorious for his victory over the Giants and for controlling all things with the nod of his brow). The text is from Horace, "Odes", Book III, 1, lines 5-8.

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. 79, no. 148.

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