HUMBERT DE SUPERVILLE, David Pierre Giottino

(b. 1770 Den Haag, d. 1849 Leiden)

Dutch painter and printmaker. He was a draughtsman, lithographer, etcher, and portrait painter, and also wrote treatises on art, including the influential work Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l’art (Leiden, 1827).

Humbert de Superville was a son of Jean Humbert, a Dutch painter of Swiss and French extraction. His brother, military engineer Jean Emile Humbert, is credited with rediscovering the lost city of Carthage. Humbert de Superville’s assumed name of Giottino was originally a nickname he was given in Italy because his work showed similarities with the Italian master Giotto. He also took the last name de Superville after his grandmother Emilie de Superville, daughter of the eminent French Calvinist theologian Daniel de Superville, who had fled to the Dutch republic in 1685.

He left the Netherlands for Rome from 1789 and lived there until 1800, when the Papal State was restored and Humbert de Superville was forced to leave the city because he had supported the 1798 occupation of Rome by French revolutionary troops. In 1812 he settled in the Dutch town of Leiden and became a lecturer at the University of Leiden. He served as head of the Leiden drawing academy Ars Aemula Naturae (1814-1823) and as first director of the Leiden cabinet of prints, drawings and plaster statues (1825-1849).

His 1801 etching Allegory may have been a direct visual inspiration for Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching. Although no direct connection has been made, de Superville had been cited by Albert Aurier as one of the forerunners of Symbolist painting and de Superville’s book Unconditional Signs in Art (1827-32) was widely known to that group.

Portrait of Johan Melchior Kemper

Johan Melchior Kemper was a lawyer and statesman. He is portrayed standing, full-length at a table with his left hand on a law book. On the back wall are plaques of King William I and the Dutch Lion. On his chest Kemper bears the insignia of the appointment as Commander of the Order of the Dutch Lion, granted on November 18, 1815 (not in November 1813 as in the painting).

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The Santa Croce Altarpiece

This drawing shows the altarpiece painted by Ugolino di Nerio, possibly between 1325 and 1328, for the high altar of Santa Croce, Florence. Originally, this massive altarpiece had at least thirty-five sections in all. These panels recall Duccio’s sense of style and organization, as Ugolino was still working with Byzantine line and colour. The altar was dismantled shortly after 1566 and moved to the church’s dormitory. By the 1830s, most of its panel had been sold. Now the surviving panels are scattered among museums and private collections.

It is thought that the drawing is in essence accurate. The draughtsman made some obvious adjustments, and the proportions of the figures relative to the frame are inaccurate. Opinions are divided as to whether the drawing was made before or after the altarpiece was cut up, and to what extent the draughtsman was copying what he actually saw.

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