Molly Lindner

My sixth grade teacher told me that my writing was "flowery," and that put a stop to any creative writing that I might have done. In the intervening decades, I became a research scholar and author of articles and now a book about portraits of women in the Roman world. My parents introduced me as a child to art, and my sister and I loved to look into the glass case with a New Kingdom mummy in the Baltimore Museum of Art. The mummy, a man, was unwrapped. His red hair and yellow teeth scared us so much that my sister and I would run up the circular staircase and then back down to scream again at what we thought was a frightful sight.

A love of art history began in college with the dreaded "Art 101" introductory level art history course. The instructors would post dozens of black and white mounted photographs on the walls of the "print study gallery." We had to memorize every image in that room, and they spread from floor to ceiling and wall to wall as the semester progressed. My grandmother paid for me to go to Europe on a study abroad tour for six weeks during the summer after my freshman year. That was the clincher. Every museum contained works of art that I had just studied in the year-long course at Smith College. My Italian professor led the tour, and we went from Bergen, Norway to Istanbul and everywhere in between. My first sight of the Nike of Samothrace in the Louvre, perched above the grand staircase nearly blew me away. It was that kind of "wow" experience that make me want to be an art historian. At Smith, the ancient Roman art historian, William MacDonald, showed us photographs of himself peering over the edge of the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome. I wondered who was holding his legs so he wouldn't fall through the opening onto the marble floor below. After that, I wanted to do what he and other art historians had done: visit cool places, and do something unusual.

That wish culminated in a year-long Fulbright Fellowship in Rome in 1992-93, together with my husband, Rudi P. Lindner, and our two school-age daughters. There I studied first-hand portrait heads, statues, and busts of the Vestal Virgins, those enigmatic priestesses of the goddess of fire and procreation, Vesta. Often, I was deep in the storerooms of museums, measuring, photographing, and studying sculptures. Sometimes, I was perched on a tall ladder studying a statue on a high pedestal. One time, the workman who had set up the ladder left for his coffee break, and I dared not climb down for fear of falling. Another time, in the Vatican Museums, I was sweating so much and standing onto of another tall ladder that I could barely keep my balance and write notes. But in the course of my research, I met wonderful scholars of many nationalities, living and work in Rome. The preface of my book lists those curators and scholars whose kindness and generosity made possible my research in Italy.