Who is Niobide?

This blog has been inspired by an image that has been following me (and to a certain extent, haunting me) since November 2005.  I was a student at Temple University’s Rome campus and haphazardly signed up for an Art History class to fulfill my art requirement – I chose “Ancient Art and Architecture” because it fit into my course schedule.  The class changed my life, as I found myself every Thursday morning traveling to a different location in the city of Rome and discovering mythology and history that had never interested me before as it took on new life in front of me.

It was one such Thursday morning that our class congregated at the Vatican Museums.  I had been both anticipating and dreading this field trip, as I was a faithful Catholic going to an extremely holy place, led by an anti-clerical professor who had a history of jokingly mocking my devotion. It was there, in the Vatican museums, that I saw a sculpture that spoke to me beyond words – the Niobide Chiaramonti:

We had been viewing various buildings and sculptures and paintings for weeks, even taking a trip to Pompeii and the archeological museum of Naples, but no piece of art had ever reached out to me in the way that this one did.

Perhaps part of it was the melody of her name: Niobide Chiaramonti.  Ne-OH-bee-day Key-are-a-MON-tee.  The words wrap around my native-English tongue like a delicious piece of dark chocolate.

Perhaps part of it was the professor’s choice to call on me and my ability to put aside my awe of the art and objectively and analytically define her Hellenistic properties and Greek-style origins.

Perhaps it is her missing pieces – I’m sure our dear niobide at one point had a head and arms, but by the time she was found in Chiaramonti, Sardinia, they had been misplaced, so we as scholars can only guess what her facial expression portrayed or how her arms also emphasized her desperate flight.

But I think the real reason this particular sculpture has stuck with me while so many others have faded back into textbooks and 3×5 notecards to be memorized is that I empathized with her motion.  I felt like she was constantly on the move, constantly running away from one thing and towards something entirely different, but not entirely sure where she was going at such high speeds.  I felt like in her eternal motion, there was also a stillness, a calm, a desire to find peace in the storm.  I felt like the beauty of this piece is that her face was missing, because I’m not sure how a sculptor could adequately carve the juxtaposition of motion and stillness, of panic and peace.

I love this sculpture because I feel like she embodies how I so often feel, like I am craving peace in a confusing world, that I (like the U2 song) am “running to stand still.”

And that’s also the inspiration and hope for the general theme of this blog – that in all my movement, in all the stresses of my life, that I may also be constantly searching for that place of calm and peace in the midst of the movement.