This interdisciplinary study deals with certain seminal ideas concerning the nature of expression formulated in the Essai sur les signes inconditionnel dans l'art , a book published serially between 1827 and 1832 on the subject of physionomy and sign theory. It is a work by Dutch artist-theorist D.P.G. Humbert de Superville, whose ideas on line and color correspondences were subsequently to exert a profound influence on the formation of fin-de-siecle Symbolist aesthetics. Humbert is acknowledged as being one of the first and finest connoisseurs of primitive or Pre-Raphaelite art. He traveled througout 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 percieved that the primal and universal experience of man were rooted in a collective unconcious that is best revealed by a study of comparitive mythology. Hence Humbert's efforts should be seen within thwe context of the great Romantic quest for the objective correlative. Because of the language problem Humbert de Superville has until recently been the subject of of only a few books or articles. This carefully documented study, published in 1979, is the most complete.
Barbara Maria Stafford was born in Vienna and is a US citizen. She received her B.A. in philosophy and comparative literature from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in connection with this she worked for some time at the Warburg Institute in London. At the time of writing this book, she taught the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware. Currently, she is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
The following chapters are at the moment available on this site:
Introduction: The Historical Background
Exposition of the Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l'art:
Sculpture: Death and Primordialism, from Baetyl to Apollo Belvedere