On a balmy spring morning in 2004, I sat on the broad window ledge in my tiny hotel room in Vienna, admiring the huge copper dome of St. Peter’s. I had stopped in the city for a day after visiting my home across the river. The air echoed with cathedral bells and the loud cooing of pigeons. I was happy, ready to return to America and to my family.

As an independent art historian and painter, I live at once in the past and the present. Whether in my native Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, in New York City, where I landed forty years ago with my eyes glued to the Statue of Liberty, or in Kingston, Ontario, where I shared my love of art with the students of Queen’s University, I have always been drawn to the past, wanting to know more about it and hoping somehow to relive it through art history and my own paintings. It wasn't difficult to chose the subject of my dissertation at a time when I wondered why, and how, artists born north of the Alps, a huge natural barrier to traverse in the Renaissance, arrived in the new cradle of art, Rome. These were questions, with so many answers that are still with me, as I write these lines.

But when my mind isn’t walking the cobblestone streets of sixteenth-century Rome and creating stories of people of that era, my greatest pleasures in life center around my family and friends, my home, my painting, and … my flowers. Flowers are everywhere in my life. (View photos of Eva's garden.) They speak to me of my European roots; of the lonely white snowdrops on the banks of the Danube; of colorful tulip carpets in Vienna; of bright poppies lining the Tuscan countryside; and of the golden-yellow dandelions popping their heads early in the spring, right here in Princeton where I live today with my husband Glenn.

In a way, flowers and my garden bridge the past and the present for me. As I kneel in my garden and feel the warmth of the soil I see life reborn, a Renaissance of sorts. It is then I want to believe that the world is good and God created all creatures equal—just as I profess in Maddalena.