Introduction: The historical background

HUMBERT'S FORMATIVE YEARSBarbara Maria Stafford: Symbol and Myth (1979)

David Pierre Humbert stemmed from a noble Franco-Swiss family that established itself in Holland during the seventeenth century. His great-grandfather, David Humbert, belonged to the famous conseil des soixantes in Geneva and, in the sixteenth century, his great-great-grandfather had been a representative on the conseil des deux cents in the same city. [6] Humbert shared his distinguished lineage with another expatriot, J.-J. Rousseau, Geneva's prodigal son, who spoke of her as "a prosperous and tranquil republic whose age to some extent loses itself in the darkness of time." [7] The author of the Contrat social felt tied to that city's aristocracy and was constantly seeking a country in which the will of society and that of government were similarly indistinguishable.

Perhaps the rapprochement between equality and the patrician Genevan republic marked the heritage of Humbert. Certainly the revolutionary movements that he was to support abroad and back in Holland, and his interest in utopian political institutions, could have been adumbrated by the Geneva of the 1760s. There the ideas of social contract and an egalitarian democracy found their first political statement. As Franco Venturi suggests, the history of Geneva at this time represents one of the purest and most nearly perfect expressions of the republican phenomenon in the late eighteenth century.

David Pierre Humbert was born in The Hague in 1770, and adopted the suffix de Superville from his mother's family. His father, Jean Humbert, son of the Genevan publisher Pierre Humbert, was a respectable Amsterdam painter. It was de rigueur then for the young man who stemmed from an artistic family to take the grand tour to Italy. His Italian journey was made possible in 1789 by W. A. Levesten, ambassador to the French court. [8] Humbert became fluent in Italian, soon emerging as a linguist-scholar who also mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German. It was during these eleven years of his Bildungsreise that he became thoroughly versed in Greek and Latin literature under the tutelage of the Abate Nicolai Mattei, whose florid hand probably recorded the impressive list of classics that the young man read. [9]

The last decade of the eighteenth century in Rome is one of the most complex in the history of art. The eternal city was, simultaneously, the center for Christianity, pagan antiquity, the Italian High Renaissance, and, even of Egyptology before Napoleon's Egyptian campaign.[10]

Cognoscenti who lived there during the closing years of the century oflfer rich and bewildering testimony concerning those years. The art historian K. A. Böttiger, who remained in Rome for nine years from 1793 on, found the level of indigenous scholarship and literature to be appalling. Fuseli, who worked for eight years in Italy, and Flaxman, who stayed for seven, cast equally jaundiced glances at that period of their lives. [11] According to the disgruntled Böttiger, most of the Italian literati could not read French or German and displaved a complete ignorance of what was happening on the other side of the Alps. Contemporary literature consisted of Goldoni, Metasasios, and the mediocre novels of Chiari. [12] Certainly these authors could not compare with Goethe, who arrived at Rome in 1786, or Herder, who came in 1788, the year of the Olympian's departure.

For Böttiger the only Italian landscape painter worth mentioning is Labruzzi, a follower of Hackert and the brother of the history painter, Campovecchio. Our author concludes his far-from-impartial review by stating that the native painters do not compare with the best of the foreigners: the Frenchman Boguet, the Fleming Denis, the Russian Mattweff, the German Reinhart, the Dutch Voogd, and the Scottish Wallis.[13]

Very little is known of Humbert's Italian sojourn. Ironically, we are sure that Humbert, who was to do only a handful of landscape studies throughout his prolific career, associated with Hendrik Voogd (1766 -1839), the "Dutch Claude," [14] a painter of pastoral landscapes and of domesticated animals, who had little in common with our artist's more impetuous allegorical modes and disdain for the inferior genres. In Rome landscape painting seems to have been the most practieed genre, with history painting lagging behind, perhaps, as Böttiger suggests, because the ultramontanist painters favored the former.[15] Nonetheless, Pietro Benvenuti and Vincenzo Camuccini, who had been influenced by the French school, were quite successful.[16]

Few foreign history painters remained in Rome after the beheading of Louis XVI in 1793. Angelica Kaufmann, "Teuffel" Mullet, and Philip Rehberg from Hamburg stayed, but A. L. Girodet-Trioson fled to Naples and J. B. Wicar to Florence. It was then, too, that Humbert traveled to Umbria with the Englishman William Young Ottley (1771-1836), the future director of the British Museum Printroom.

Perhaps the most important element of this era was the possibility it offered young artists for a wide range of friendships and associations. As öttiger suggests, despite the upheaval of the times and the inferior quality of art produced by the Italians in comparison to Italy s glorious past, a refreshing spirit of reform was everywhere apparent.

One is fed up with the meaningless, the common, and searches for what is better; one strives again for precision and greatness of style, for character and significance . . . And if the correct path is not yet found, at least it is sought and one again approaches it.[17] This reform affected two social institutions: the founding of museums and the nature of private collections. Some of the artists already mentioned, such as Wicar, Fabre, Ottley, Bossi, and Humbert, were to become known not only for their artistic productions but also as the future founders of museums. In addition, by the late eighteenth century, we find Seroux d'Agincourt, Wicar, Ottley, Dufourney, Hugford, Patch, Strange, Cardinal Fesch, Cacault, Roscoe, and Solly assembling collections of primitives.[18]

Humbert's friendship with the stringent Davidian, Jean-Baptiste Wicar, the painter from Lille who shared his admiration for the early Italian schools and an equally uncompromising view of the nature of art, is well-known.[19] Wicar (1762-1834), with his notoriously difficult personality, was a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome, then under the directorship of Ménageot (1787-1792). After Louis XVI's execution he returned to Paris in 1793, drawn by David's rising fortunes. The Lillois quickly denounced the unrevolutionary and hence unpatriotic "infamous conduct" of Ménageot, along with that of his fellow artists. Not only did he include most of the pensioners at Rome in his jeremiads but he threatened all genre painters with the scaffold.[20] Wicar originally came to David`s studio from Lille in 1779, and in the great artist's atelier he was connected with Girodet, Gros, Gérard, Guérin, Drouais, and Fabre. The Lilois' active interest in early Italian art seemed to flower during his second trip to Florence in 1787, where he and his collaborators, particularly Joubert, began the Gallerie de Florence, executing drawings that were subsequently engraved by Louis-Joseph Masquelier.[21]

Like Humbert, Wicar was an inadequate painter although an excellent draftsman. In 1789, when the first part of the Gallerie de Florence appeared, the artist was twenty-seven years old and all of his attention up to that moment had been focused on drawing. At a time when Flaxman was still relatively unknown, Wicar esteemed drawing as the sole tool that promised consummate artistry - a prejudice quickly picked up by the young Humbert.[22]

Equally important to the development of Humbert's ideas was Seroux d'Agincourt (1730-1814), whose Histoire de l'art par les monumens was written between 1779 and 1789, and who established himself in Rome in 1782. However, his trips investigating early monuments of art were all made prior to that year. He was a wealthy nobleman who, upon his arrival, could present among other credentials his friendship with Mariette, Caylus, Voltaire, Rousseau, Fragonard, and Cochin. D'Agincourt also cultivated his Italian colleagues; he knew the Abate Morelli of Venice, in Bologna he met the Canon Crespi, in Modena he associated with Tiraboschi, and in Florence he was acquainted with the director of the archducal gallery, Giuseppi Pelli-Benevienni. Delle Valle was his cicerone in Siena, and Lanzi, the antiquarian for the grand-ducal gallery of Florence, congratulated him on the first edition of his work. D'Agincourt's monumental study forms a link between the earlier generation of students of primitive art and that of Artaud de Montor, Paillot de Montabertt and Ottley. In 1789, when the Frenchman returned to Paris to have his work printed, he was caught up in the Revolution, and thirty years elapsed before the first edition appeared (1811-1820); however, this hiatus did not profoundly alter the structure of the study.[23]

It was this scholarly milieu, filled with museum directors, connoisseurs, and literati, that Humbert de Superville entered. He became, along with Bossi, Wicar, Canova, Paillot de Montabert, and Ottley, one of the young draftsmen in the circle around Seroux d'Agincourt-although their actual meeting can only be conjectured, since Humbert arrived in Rome the year of the Frenchman's departure. Previtali has said that Humbert represented at the close of the eighteenth century "the case of the most advanced historieal understanding of the style (and, even, styles) of the masterpieces by our 'primitives'."[24] How was this superiority achieved? We have already observed that to escape the tumult in Rome after Louis XVI's death, Humbert embarked on a journey to Umbria, where he copied the facade o£ the Cathedral of Orvieto, which he attributed to the school of Nicola Pisano. Ottley and he also journeyed to Perugia and Assisi where, in the lower church, Humbert copied a Vision of St. Martin then thought to be by Buonamico Buffalmacco. Even while in Rome, the center of High Renaissance and Baroque art. he shared his typically late-eighteenth-century admiration for Michelangelo with an enthusiasm for medieval art. By comparison, Flaxman, who was in that city between 1787 and 1794, shows himself to be distinctly inferior to the Dutch artist in the art of copying earlier masters, as can be seen in his two Italian sketchbooks (Victoria and Albert Museum).[25]

When the Treaty of Tolentino was signed on February 19, 1797, a provisionary peace was brought to Rome. In 1798 the political unification of Italy under French rule made it possible for Humbert and Ottley, with Tomasso Piroli replacing Carlo Cencioni as engraver, to embark on a second trip, which took them to Tuscany. They traveled to Florence, Lucca, and Pisa, where they drew Andrea Pisano's Baptistry door reliefs, works by Taddeo Gaddi and Giovanni di Milano in Santa Croce, Paolo Uccello's frescoes in the Green Cloisters, and the Campo Santo frescoes at Pisa.[26] By 1799 Ottley- and Humbert returned to Rome, where they copied Masolino's fresco in San Clemente and Melozzo da Forli's Christ in Glory from the Quirinale. That same year Humbert visited Subiaco, where his admiration for the frescoes in Santa Scolastica and in San Benedetto were new to Italian connoisseurs.[27] His interest in Meo da Siena's Triumph of Death in the Sacro Speco is only the beginning of a recurrent fascination with such a subject.

When the King of Naples seized Rome on November 29, 1799, Humbert fought on the side of the Republicans, and was subsequently captured and jailed in the fortress of Civitavecchia.[28] During the ensuing four-month imprisonment, his entire Italian oeuvre disappeared.[29] Until Ilaria Toesca's discovery of an anonymous cache of drawings that she correctly attributed to Humbert, we possessed from his Italian period only the Leiden sketchbook, scattered drawings primarily in the collection of the Leiden Prentenkabinet and engravings made after Humbert's original drawings and reproduced in Seroux d'Agincourt's Histoire de l'art and in Ottley's Early Florentine School.[30] Significantly, the impact produced by the early masters of art was never to leave him. This admiration was acknowledged when on October 11, 1811, nine years after leaving Italy, he legally took the name of "Giottin" although he had been called "Giottino" since 1795 thus becoming David Pierre Giottin Humbert de Superville.[31] We know that after his imprisonment Humbert traveled to France. Among the Leiden MSS there is a short memorandum on Nicholas Gagliuffi of Ragusa, a former Catholic priest, an eminent Latinist, a great admirer of Dante, and a senator of Rome, with whom Humbert was imprisoned.

Prisoner along with me at the depot of Civitavecchia during the months of November, December, January, and February in the years 1799 and 1800. The following March we embarked on an English packet boat and were taken first to Ciotat, then to Toulon and, finally, to Marseilles, where I left him. Having been exchanged, I made my way to Paris in April of the same year, 1800.32] Humbert seems to have been in Paris from 1800 to 1802, as de Haas has shown, rather than to 1803 as stated in Bodel Nijenhuis's brief biography.[33] At any rate, no verifying document exists from this period. It is probable that he went to Paris to see the art treasures captured by Napoleon. Between 1799 and 1815 Paris presented an inexhaustible treasure trove to the amateur. The first convoy of confiscated art arrived from the Southern Netherlands in September 1794 and shortly thereafter works from Italy began to appear in a steady stream. The rehabilitation of the primitives that had begun in Italy now accelerated in Paris, where the masterpieces of the conquered countries were displayed in the Musée Central.[34] The capital eity of France in those years could offer the eager young artist, besides its rightful art. the combined experiences of the Middle Ages (the Boisserée brothers),[35] classical aesthetics (Quatremère de Quincy), the founding of museums (Alexandre Lenoir), and the developing research into oriental studies and comparative linguistics ( Silvestre de Sacy, Friedrich Schlegel )[36].

The story of Humbert's life after his return to Holland can be quickly told. It is believed that he arrived in Amsterdam in 1802. Humbert had sufficiently established himself by 1803 to be made a member of the artists' organization, "Felix Meritis."[37] His admiration for the great Town Hall of Amsterdam seems to stem from this period. We shall see it preoccupying him later when he projects a monument to Lt. Speyck and two Utopian edifices.[38] Between 1805 and 1812 he was an instructor in geography, drawing, architecture, Italian, and French at the Naval Academy, which was moved in 1809 from Feyenoord near Rotterdam to Enckhuysen.[39] It was at Enckhuysen that he seems first to have studied Kantian philosophy, through both private reading and discussions with a certain Professor S.[40] As we shall see, his competence in the disciplines of geography, geology, and philosophy were to prove useful in the creation of his aesthetic theory. In 1812 Humbert came to Leiden, first teaching drawing at the academy of design, "Ars Aemula Naturae," and then lecturing in French and Italian at the University of Leiden. It was there that he met, late in 1813, the famous professor of jurisprudence Johan Melchior Kemper, whose wisdom was responsible for the creation of a constitutional monarchy in Holland.[41] This association could only have sharpened Humbert's political awareness, already molded in Italy during the period of the French Revolution, forged during Holland's creation of a new state and, eventually, coming to fruition in the visionary project of "Les Deux Édifices."

In 1809 Humbert was named a correspondent to the fourth class of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands (K.N.I.) in Amsterdam. By 1822, he had been made a member.[42] It was before this frequently hostile body that he tested some of his theories. In 1825 he was appointed the first director of the printroom of the University of Leiden, a post that he retained until his death in 1849. He devised for the prints there a classification according to subject matter, which remains in manuscript form. It is a system that is outmoded and impossible to use today, but fascinating in terms of what he thought worthy of collecting, and for the aperçus hidden within its pages. [next chapter: Introduction, Revolution in expressive theory]