Faculty Leaders

Professor Fabio Barry

Assistant professor of art history

Fabio Barry was born in London to an Italo-Irish family. He came to his field by multiple routes, first as a budding painter and classicist, then as an architect and lastly as an art historian. His passion for art and archaeology was nurtured by his father, also a painter, his childhood fascination with ancient languages and the long summers spent at his mother’s home in the Sabine Hills. It’s in his blood. As a practicing architect, he privately pursued his  specialism in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture. When he eventually re-entered academe, his PhD—on the symbolism of marble from antiquity until the Age of Enlightenment—opened his eyes to the full spectrum of “low” and “high” arts and extended his range to Byzantium and Europe’s Middle Ages. It also returned him to his first love, the arts and literature of classical antiquity. His enthusiasm to visit and revisit the cultural centers of Italy remains boundless.

 

• Assistant professor of art history, by courtesy of classics, Stanford University, since 2013
• Associate professor of art history, University of St Andrews, Scotland, 2006-2013
• Fellow, Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, 2012
• Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize of the College Art Association of America, 2007
• Curatorial fellow, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2004
• David E. Finley Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000–2003
• PhD, art history, 2007, Columbia University
• BA, 1987; MA, 1988, architecture; all Cambridge University