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, "Amicitiae trútina (title)/ _____ amicús duclis, ut aeqúúm est, / Cúm mea compenset vitiis bona, pluribus hisce, / Si modo plúra mihi bona sunt, inclinet amari/ Si volet hâc lege, in trútina ponetur eadem" (My kindly friend must, as is fair, weigh my virtues against my faults, if he wishes to gain my love, and must turn the scales in their favour as being the more numerous - if only my virtues are more numerous. On that condition he shall be weighed in the same scale. The text is from Horace, "Satires", Book I, 3, lines 69-72.
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. 87, no. 178.