ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a life-sized version donated to the Princeton University Art Museum in 1896 from the estate of the physician and writer Abraham Coles. The press championed Nydia’s material in its announcement of the statue’s donation to Princeton by Coles’s children in 1896. Drawing attention to the socio-environmental history of art materials, however, opens up new perspectives on iconic works like Nydia. Works like Nydia purposefully obscure any sign of the sculptor’s hand and, as Charmaine Nelson has argued, uphold a cultural ideal of a racially pure and chaste whiteness divorced from “context, environment, and condition” On a narrative level, Nydia was inspired by an instance of cataclysmic environmental change: the violent eruption of Vesuvius. In the United States in the late nineteenth century, one of the more ubiquitous marble “exquisite shapes” was Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, by the sculptor Randolph Rogers.
