Fabio Barry

Architectural historian Fabio Barry says architecture and poetry have always mirrored each other by analogy. While some pre-modern theorists applauded the capacity of poetry to ‘paint’ a picture of a building, others recognised that poets had to construct descriptions to describe constructions.

Barry says this inherent affinity with architecture meant that buildings were on the writer’s mind even before they described them. If the ekphrasis – in Greek a vivid description of a place – was recited in place, the building becomes an echo chamber for its own description. The imagery of poetry made it the supreme genre of literature for describing architecture and even rivalled it, for, according to Horace, poems would outlive buildings as monuments.

Barry is author of Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity, winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He has taught at the University of St. Andrews and Stanford University and is currently associate fellow of the Warburg Institute at the University of London.