Felicia Marlene Else
Professor
Art and Art History
Contact
Address
Room 112
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400
Website
curriculum vitaeEducation
PhD Washington University in St. Louis, 2003
Academic Focus
Italian Renaissance Art
Felicia Else has been pursuing research on water, art, cartography, natural history and festivals in 16th-century Florence, including the well-known Neptune Fountain in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence by Bartolomeo Ammannati. She is the author of The Politics of Water in the Art and Festival of Medici Florence: from Neptune Fountain to Naumachia (Routledge, 2019) and has published articles in Burlington Magazine, Sixteenth Century Journal, Imago Mundi and Sculpture Journal. She has contributed academic publications on water and wine fountains, pufferfish in the Renaissance and artistic representations of naval battles and water management. She is a co-editor and contributor to Giants and Dwarfs in European Art & Culture, c. 1350-1700: Real, Imagined, Metaphorical for Monsters and Marvels. Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Amsterdam University Press).
Her teaching draws on her passion for art, history and study abroad. She served as the Resident Director for the Gettysburg College Study Abroad Program in England, leading an onsite course in London on Museums, Repatriation and Decolonization. Her courses cover art from Antiquity to the Baroque. She has helped students curate exhibitions in the Schmucker Art Gallery, including two inspired by Renaissance curiosity cabinets, “The Gettysburg Cabinet” (2012 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/2012/ and “Wonders of Nature and Artifice” (2017 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/2017/). Others include prints from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in "Artful Nature and the Legacy of Maria Sibylla Merian" (2019 at https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/artful-nature/), "The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825" and "A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825" with additional material at https://schmucker-art-gallery.sites.gettysburg.edu/a-portrait-of-the-artist/?kubio-preview=saved&kubio-random=ZqpyNDUN4-UGLy4Sd7xa. She has promoted the use digital technology in art history, directing student research in the development of dynamic websites on Renaissance works in Gettysburg College's Special Collections, including sites by Daniella Snyder '18 on a 17th century Dutch World Map at http://daniellasnyder.sites.gettysburg.edu/maps_as_art/ and Sophia Gravenstein '22 on a Portrait of Martin Luther by the Workshop of Lucas Crananch the Younger at https://special-collections.sites.gettysburg.edu/martin-luther/gettysburg-colleges-luther/.
Courses Taught
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Article Bartolomeo Ammannati: Moving Stones, Managing Waterways and Building an Empire for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici Sixteenth Century Journal 42/2 (Summer 2011), 393-425.
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Article “‘La maggior porcheria del mondo'—documents for Ammannati’s Neptune Fountain,” Burlington Magazine, 147 (July 2005), pp. 487-491
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Article “Spectacles of Fire and Water: Performing the Destructive Forces of Early Modern Naval Battles” Performance and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe, eds. by Margaret Shewring and Leila Zammar, Arti d
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Book The Politics of Water in the Art and Festivals of Medici Florence: From Neptune Fountain to Naumachia Routledge
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Article Globefish, Sturgeon and Trout: Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, Bachiacca and the Consuming Culture of Fish Medicea. Rivista interdisciplinare di studi medicei, n. 9 (June, 2011), 20-29
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Book Giants and Dwarfs in European Art and Culture, ca. 1350-1750
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Article The Sign of the Southern Cross: Borghini's Peru in the Maritime Arch of the 1565 Entrata of Johanna of Austria into Florence Charity, Medicine, and Religion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Essays in Memory of Phillip
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Article Straightening the Arno: Artistic Representations of Water Management in Medici Ducal and Grand Ducal Florence Disaster in the Early Modern World: Examinations, Representations, Interventions