Childhood, Youth, and Personal Life
Spike grew up in New York City and Tenafly, New Jersey where he was a friend and classmate of the actor Ed Harris at Tenafly High School. His father was the Rev. Robert Spike, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and his brother is Paul Spike, an author and the first American to be named editor of the British satirical magazine Punch. After undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University, he earned his PhD from Harvard University in art history in 1979. His dissertation was the first complete study of Mattia Preti (1613-1699), an important painter of the Caravaggio school. Spike was later awarded honorary citizenship of Taverna, the Italian city that was Preti's birthplace, in recognition of his studies of Preti.
He permanently resides in Florence, Italy with his wife Michèle Kahn Spike, a lawyer and biographer of Matilda of Tuscany, and is the father of one son, Nicholas.
Read more about this topic: John Spike
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