Christopher J. Nygren

An unprecedented investigation of painting on stone in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy that considers the ecological and artistic forces that made the genre transformative. In 1530, the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547) chose an unusual surface for a painting of Christ: a large hewn stone. Treating the stone as a portable canvas, Sebastiano created a work of art that...