This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at the Institute of Historical Research, Pollard N301 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU).
Abstract:
Amphion built seven-gated Thebes with his seven-stringed lyre by enchanting the stones into walls and bonding them with his song.
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. This inherent affinity with architecture meant that buildings were on the writer’s mind even before they described them. If the ekphrasis was recited in place the building become 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.s that shared the psychoanalytical impulses and prompts since the late nineteenth century.
Speaker:
Fabio Barry studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, and briefly practiced before a PhD in art history at Columbia University. He has taught at the University of St Andrews and Stanford University. Much of his published research has concentrated on artistic production in Rome, particularly Baroque architecture, but he has also written about classical architecture and Roman archaeology, Byzantine and medieval art. His book Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity until the Enlightenment (Yale University Press 2020) was named “Best Book published in Architecture and Urban Studies” by the Association of American Publishers (2020) and received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2021).
Registration:
Register using the form below. You will be emailed prior to the seminar with a reminder of the joining information shown on the following screen.