Recent years have seen a flood of publications on female portraiture in the classical world. There have been close analyses of important individuals and of particular statue types as well as broad-ranging surveys: for example, Elizabeth Bartman, Portraits of Livia: Imaging the Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome (1999); Jennifer Trimble, Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (2011); Sheila Dillon, The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World (2010). In this new book, Molly Lindner takes a different path, analysing the portrait production of Rome's most prominent priestesses, the Vestal Virgins. Given the Virgins' wealth, social prestige and religious rôle, this is a significant topic, and one that reveals Roman imperial sculptors working at the top of their game to craft distinctive images of sanctity and power.

The principal aim of this book is to examine the extant portraits of Vestal Virgins — sixteen are catalogued, while five headless sculptures are brought into the discussion on a more informal basis (126) — and to use textual and archaeological sources to illuminate their iconography, display contexts, functions and meanings. L. shows how closely these priestesses' images tracked those of their imperial and élite peers, for instance in aspects of dress and hairstyle. At the same time, she makes clear how carefully sculptors highlighted the Vestals' unique status through their distinctive insignia of office and perhaps through an unusual pose as well, as she reconstructs them burning incense (ch. 12). Her chief argument is that physiognomic resemblances between the Vestals and empresses are intentional and meant to signal the close patronage relationships that existed between these two groups of powerful women (122).

The book opens with a brief literature review and an outline of the monograph (ch. 1). It then follows an essentially tripartite structure, examining first who the Vestals were and how they lived (chs 2–4), then what their portraits looked like (chs 5–9), and, finally, how they resembled and differed from other women in their imagery (chs 10–13). Since according to L., the Vestals' portraits date stylistically from the Hadrianic to Severan eras, the analysis is focused on the second to early third centuries. In this it differs from the recent work by Robin Lorsch Wildfang, Rome's Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses in the Late Republic and Early Empire (2006), which was centred on the period of transition from Republic to Empire. L.'s work resembles instead Nina Mekacher's Die vestalischen Jungfrauen in der römischen Kaiserzeit (2006) in its imperial era focus and use of epigraphic and archaeological evidence, although the conclusions drawn often differ.

The heart of the book is its close visual analysis of the preserved Vestal portraits. These are images of high technical quality and considerable iconographic complexity, appropriately for women coming from the top echelons of Roman society. The portraits are recognizable as Vestals due to certain details of their headdresses (infulae, vittae, suffibula) as well as their findspots, predominantly within the Atrium Vestae in the Roman Forum. Since the Vestals were required to serve for thirty years — and could choose to extend their term — the portraits range considerably in the age of those depicted, from very youthful and idealized images (for example, Cat. 2) to decidedly mature (Cat. 3) and even elderly (Cat. 11). The mature and elderly images are indeed among the most visually striking works within the corpus and offer a refreshing change from the often more youthful and generic images of empresses of this period. It is noteworthy, however, that even with the Vestals, the bodies (where preserved) remain more conventionally idealized, although L. argues that their incense-burning poses are more active than those of other Roman female statue types (243).

The question of the meaning of physiognomic resemblances between Vestals and imperial women is both the most interesting aspect of the book and, likely, its most controversial point. L.'s interpretation is stated most succinctly and unequivocally in a discussion of a Hadrianic Vestal statue that resembles Matidia the Elder, niece of Trajan and mother of Sabina: ‘Such physiognomic similarity was a powerful political tool by which the Vestals could both claim and reinforce connections to their patrons among the imperial women’ (121–2). Caution is necessary here. It is true that we have abundant literary documentation for ties between Vestals and the powerful women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (28–30). It is also clear that the extant Vestal portraits can be very close in physiognomy to those of imperial women, and in some cases, men (e.g. Cat. 1, with Trajan's close-set eyes and sunken cheeks, 129). However, there are no preserved literary sources documenting alliances with imperial women during the second to third centuries, the period within which all extant portraits date. In addition, the fact that the Vestals' portraits can resemble those of emperors, or imperial women like Crispina who held power only very briefly (Cat. 10, 143–5), suggests that we should be wary of reconstructing close political alliances with empresses from physiognomic resemblance alone.

Such differences of interpretation aside, this is a clear, closely observed book on a well-defined and important topic, in essence a microhistory of imperial art. It makes a contribution to our understanding of the representation of women in the Roman world, and also suggests how — some forty years after pioneering works such as Natalie Kampen, Images and Status of Roman Working Women: Second and Third Century Reliefs from Ostia (1976) — there is still much that remains to be done.