Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Amor virtutis

Image not available
Otto van Veen
1556-1629

Amor virtutis

7 3/16 x 5 3/4 inches (181 x 147 mm)
Brush and off-white and light brown oil, and pen and brown ink; on a paper prepared with a light brown ground of lead white tinted with yellow-brown ochre and a little red in oil medium; incised with the stylus.
Van Veen Album, folio 10

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

Notes
Watermark: since the drawings are laid down, no watermarks, if any, are visible, even with fiber-optic light.
Engraved on reverse, 1607.
Inscriptions/Markings
Inscribed on the album page below the design, in brown ink, "Amor virtútis (title)/ Oderúnt peccare boni virtutis amore,/ Tu nihil admittes in te formidine poenae,/ Sit Spes fallendi, miscebis sacra profanis" (The good hate vice because they love virtue; you [i.e., the slave] will commit no crime because you dread punishment. Suppose there's hope of escaping detection; you will make no difference between sacred and profane). The text is from Horace, "Epistles", Book I, 16, lines 52-54.
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. 71-72, no. 122.
Classification
Century Drawings
School
Department