Dr. Christopher Nygren is Chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. He is a specialist in early modern art, with a focus on art of the Italian Renaissance. His book 2020, Titian’s Icons: Charisma, Tradition, and Devotion in the Italian Renaissance, won the 2022 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. And he currently serves as one of three Articles Editors for Renaissance Quarterly.
Nygren’s current research agenda interrogates the theme of ecological art history – what does it mean to approach historical art through an ecological lens? His forthcoming book, Sedimentary Aesthetics: Painting on Stone and the Ecology of Early Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2026) offers a preliminary response to this question.
Since 2015, Dr. Nygren also researches the impact of advanced computation on the History of Art. Between 2017 and 2019 he was Principal Investigator for “The Morelli Machine,” a project funded by the National Science Foundation (project ID: TG-ART170002) that used advance super computing to test the hypothesis that the nexus of style and authorship can be interrogated computationally. The findings of that project were published (in collaboration with Alison Langmead) in Digital Humanities Quarterly. More recently, he has been considering the role that Artificial Intelligence plays in researching the History of Art. He has co-authored an article reflecting on some of the challenges that our field faces when looking to incorporate Artificial Intelligence into its tradition research agendas.
Dr. Nygren is also developing a number of collaborative research projects, which give the humanities a public face, including the Genealogies of Modernity project (https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/). He is co-founder of the Gun Violence and Its Histories working group at the University of Pittsburgh, which aims to shed light on the historical contexts around gun violence. Guns, gun violence, and societal responses to them change over time and in response to the fluctuation of local, national, and global forces. GVH believes that excavating and exposing the historicity of those trajectories not only highlights the potentialities that are embedded in our own historicity, but also reveals that early modernists working in the humanities have something to say about gun violence today.
- Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University (2011)
- M.A. Johns Hopkins University (2005)
- B.A. University of Notre Dame (2003)
Education & Training
- Millard Meiss Publication Fund, College Art Association subvention for Sedimentary Aesthetics.
- Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance for Titian’s Icons from the Renaissance Society of America, 2022.
- Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, CASVA, 2021-22
- RSA-Kress Mid-Career Publication Fellowship for Titian’s Icons, 2019
- Gladys Krieble Delmas Publication Subvention for Titian’s Icons 2019
- American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for the project Matter and Similitude in Italian Painting and The Transatlantic Renaissance, 2017-18.
SINGLE-AUTHORED BOOKS
Sedimentary Aesthetics: Painting on Stone and the Ecology of Early Modern Art. Yale University Press, 2026.
Titian’s Icons: Tradition, Charisma, and Devotion in Renaissance Italy. Penn State University Press, 2020.
ARTICLES
Co-authored with Sonja Drimmer, “Art History and AI: Ten Axioms.” International Journal for Digital Art History 10, 5.01-10 (2023).
“Titian’s Icons.” Revivals or Survivals? The Resurgences of the Icon from the Renaissance to Nowadays, edited by Ralph Dekoninck (Milan: Silvana, 2023), 80-95.
“From the Quarry to the Studio,” in Timeless Wonder: Painting on Stone in Rome in the Cinquecento and Seicento, catalog of the exhibition edited by Francesca Cappelletti and Patrizia Cavazzini. Rome: Officina libraria, 2022: 61-69. (Italian translation, “Dalla cava allo studio” in Meraviglia senza tempo: pittura su pietra a Roma tra Cinquecento e Seicento, a cura di Francesca Cappelletti and Patrizia Cavazzini. Rome: Officina libraria, 2022: 61-69).
“Sedimentary Aesthetics,” in Purity and Contamination in Early Modern Art and Architecture, edited by Lauren Jacobi and Daniel Zolli (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 129 -155.
“Leonardo, Morelli, and the Computational Mirror” (co-authored with Alison Langmead and Paul Rodriguez). Digital Humanities Quarterly 15.1 (2021).
