One sculpture that caught my attention the most at the Met was Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (1856), by American sculptor Randolph Rogers. The girl sculpted was based off of a character in the book The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. The girl in shown here was caught in the eruption of Mount. Vesuvius, and is desperately trying to navigate her way through the city to the seashore with her two companions without using her eye sight. She becomes separated from them, and is now just trying to survive. Her eye sight has been proven useless from the ash and blackness that surrounds her from the eruption so she must depend of her sense of hearing and touch. The column next to Nydia represents the fallen city and how destroyed and broken it really was while the torn clothing she was wearing is a good indicator of how chaotic things around her really were. The facial expression and the overall bodily posture of Nydia shows how desperate she had become in finding her way out of the city and to find her companions again.
The reason this sculptor caught my attention the most was the way that Nydia was standing. When learning about the story behind the sculpture, it had become that much more interesting. When I think of marble sculptures, I think more about higher up people being sculpted, like roman gods and goddess', not a random girl. The detail of the dress and the column next to her also drew me in, because of how mcuh detail had been put into it. The way that marble can be sculpted in such a way to make clothing look realistic and almost soft amazes me. When I can barely draw, Rogers can create something like this and it really is amazing.
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