John Spike

John Thomas Spike (born November 8, 1951, in New York City) is an American art historian, curator, and author, specializing in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods.

His Fra Angelico, which also appeared in a German edition by Hirmer Verlag, was named “Art Book of the Year 1997” by the Hearst newspapers in the USA.

[7] In 2007, Spike was appointed to the faculty of the master's program in Sacred Art History jointly offered by the European University of Rome and the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum.

Between 2012 and 2019 Spike was Assistant Director and Chief Curator of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

During his tenure, Spike curated and authored the catalogues for several international loan exhibitions of Italian art including Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti and A Brush with Passion: Mattia Preti (1613-1699) as part of the "2013 Year of Italian Culture" in the United States in cooperation with the Italian foreign ministry;[8] Caravaggio Connoisseurship: Saint Francis in Meditation and the Capitoline Fortune Teller in 2014; Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty in 2015;[9] and Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfire of the Vanities, with Alessandro Cecchi, in 2017.

[12] For the fall of 2017, Spike curated for the Muscarelle the exhibition, Fred Eversley: 50 Years an Artist: Light & Space & Energy, that was shown as part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the admission of African-American students to The College of William & Mary, 1967–2017.

The book drew acclaim for its discussion of Porter's oeuvre as a leading figurative painter who struggled to achieve recognition in the post-war decades dominated by Abstract Expressionism.