Christopher Nygren is associate professor of early modern art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research focus on the intersection of religion, philosophy, and art in the Italian Renaissance. In 2022, his book, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance (Penn State, 2020), won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. He is currently writing a second book-length project that investigates the phenomenon of painting on stone substrates, which emerged in Italy around 1530. This project is provisionally titled Sedimentary Aesthetics: Painting on Stone and the Ecology of Early Modern Art. Prof. Nygren is also developing several collaborative research projects, including in the Digital Humanities. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Principal Investigator on “The Morelli Machine,” a project funded by the National Science Foundation that sought to examine whether computational methods might be used in the attribution of old master paintings.