Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.
On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.
In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
Exhibition review
Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance
by Matthew Biedermann | 15 February 2023
Figure 1: Donatello, David (Florence: Opera del Duomo, c. 1409).
Descending downward into the V&A’s subterranean Sainsbury wing, we are immediately confronted with the alert gaze of Donatello’s David (fig. 1, c. 1409). This marble David, an early work originally destined for Florence’s Duomo but confiscated and reinterpreted as a civic symbol by the city’s republican government, sets the tone of the exhibition. Less well known than his later bronze David—which was unable to travel—Donatello’s marble stands at the precipice between two eras, one foot in the stylized lexicon of the late medieval and another anticipatory of the dramatic artistic innovations witnessed in 15th century Italy. This David signals the hesitant first steps of the slow evolution away from the mostly religious benefaction of earlier periods towards the burgeoning role of the civic and private patronage in commissioning works of art.
Stage set, the exhibition, curated by Peta Motture, proceeds to articulate its central argument that Donatello, billed as “arguably the greatest sculptor of all time,” established the source code for later artists, who endlessly adapted his artistic idiom in many different media. The show includes a great variety of objects from antiquity to the 19th centuries, ranging from the smallest medallions to monumental bronze statues . Attempting to compensate for the impossibility of many works in Donatello’s prolific oeuvre to travel, the displays are populated with the work of many other artists, including his contemporaries Beltramino de Zuttis da Rho, Michelozzo, and Masaccio, as well as later masters including Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Marco Zoppo. The curators had to contend with the realities of collaborative 15th century workshop practices against today’s obsession with the artist’s hand, as well as a significant deficit of documentary evidence on Donatello’s life, where even his most famed David bronze is not recorded until after the artist’s death in 1466. The result is a cautious profusion of potential, possible, and probable attributions on most of the object labels.
This lack of certainty strikes against notions of grand retrospective exhibitions lavished on later artists like Cézanne and Freud, where the majority of works are by the master, and might disappoint viewers expecting to witness Donatello’s full portfolio. However, the V&A offsets this weakness by excavating the material circumstances in which Donatello worked, exhibiting, for example, a pair of the ledgers recording Donatello’s catasto, the early renaissance equivalent to today’s tax returns, which reveal his business relationship with the sculptor Michelozzo.
Another highpoint of the show is the transition about halfway through from sacred to secular, where Donatello’s beautiful but formulaic Madonnas fade in favour of new secular subjects, like the stunning and enigmatic Atttis-Amorino (fig. 2-3, 1435-40), a free-standing bronze which is a composite between a cupid, a shepherd, and a god. Donatello masterfully articulates the curious trousers on this putto—seemingly a forerunner to today’s assless (and crotchless) chaps—which raise pertinent questions to scholarly debates on how renaissance viewers treated nudity in civic and religious works and whether erotic connotations are merely anachronistic readings.
The show similarly succeeds in its ability to demonstrate the huge variety of works Donatello created. In a period before the notion of artist as divinely inspired genius, creators operated as artisans commissioned for a variety media. Seeing his sculptural work, from the shallow, suggestive lines of his rivelevo schiacciato relief on the MFA Boston’s Madonna of the Clouds (fig. 4, c. 1425-35), to the breath-taking veristic agony of Christ in his life-size bronze Crucifix from the Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Padua (fig. 5, 1444-49), provides an excellent primer on the range of Donatello’s abilities as well as the variety of expectations patrons had for commissions.
The exhibition’s argument for Donatello’s massive influence on later artists is mostly convincing as well and employs representations from late 15th century Padua to Victorian-era plaster casts and forgeries. At some points, however, the curators seem to take a step to far, for instance surrounding Donatello’s ten-year residence in Padua. This section places Donatello’s bronze Sant’Antonio Dead Christ with Angels (1449) in conversation with Giovanni Bellini’s Museo Correr oil panel Dead Christ (1465), positing that Donatello’s Christ was “undoubtedly” a model for Bellini (fig. 6). While Donatello certainly proved influential up and down the Italian peninsula, these two works do not betray a close formal similarity beyond sharing an extraordinarily popular subject, and it seems as though the curators are regurgitating a common Central Italian bias against the ability of Northern Italian artists to generate independent stylistic innovations.
The exhibition layout is excellent, flowing purposefully yet elegantly from Donatello’s early religious sculptures, into his fascinating secular commissions, and ending with his 19th century imitators and counterfeiters. One small gripe is with the show’s dim and low lighting, casting unnecessary shadows onto works and didactic material. While seemingly a compromise between the lack of natural light in this basement exhibition space, the anachronism of bright gallery lighting on works originally intended for candle-lit churches, and the sensitivity of some of the displayed works on paper, the end result does little to evoke the atmosphere of these works’ original sites while obfuscating the works themselves. Overall, this exhibition is a great primer on the workshop practices and stylistic evolution evident in early 15th century Italy, revealing less Donatello the man or the artist and capturing more the artistic fever and zeitgeist gripping Renaissance Italy in the early 15th century.
