Symbol and Myth: Humbert de Superville's Essay on Absolute signs in Art
Barbara Maria Stafford

University of Delaware Press
Illustrated. 206 pp. 8-3/4/ x 11-1/4.
L.C. 76-19842
ISBN 0-87413-120-0
Printed in the U.S.A

This interdisciplinary study deals with certain seminal ideas concerning the nature of expression formulated in de Superville's "Essay on Absolute Signs in Art." This documented study, illustrated with 104 figures will, because of its art historical content and theoretical bent reveal much about the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Humbert is acknowledged as being one of the first and finest connoisseurs of primitive or Pre-Raphaelite art. He traveled throughout Tuscany copying in a delicate and sensitive manner the works of key trecento masters, absorbing their principles of composition. This taste for the beginning of art led to his later exploration of the origin of the creative act itself, and to the fathoming of the very nature of expression. Long before Jung, he perceived that the primal and universal experiences of man were rooted in a collective unconscious that is best revealed by a study of comparative mythology. Hence Humbert's efforts should be seen within the context of the great Romantic quest for the objective correlative.

Humbert, like his generation, was fascinated by the art of primitive cultures: the Egypt of the Napoleonic expedition, the Persia of Chardin, the South Sea Islands of Cook, and even the lost Atlantis of Roggeveen's Easter Island. For the artists, writers, and philosophers of the period these enigmas raised the question of the inception of the arts and of civilization, and of the reasons behind their eventual development and expected decline.

Because of the language problem Humbert de Superville has until recently been the subject of only a scant Dutch biography. This carefully documented study, illustrated with 104 figures (many of them hitherto-unpublished drawings and photographs), will, because of its art historical content and theoretical bent, appeal to a wide range of scholars interested in the cultural history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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