Rate My Professor Sheila Ffolliott

Sheila Ffolliott, Professor Emerita in Arts and Culture at George Mason University, served as a distinguished faculty member in the Department of History and Art History from 1978 to 2010. Holding a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania (1979) and an A.B. in Italian from Vassar College (1967), she chaired the Art Department and the Art History Department, and coordinated the Art History Program. She taught more than 150 unique course sections to over 2,500 students, offering courses on Early Renaissance Art in Italy, The English Country House and Garden, Patronage and Collecting in Europe c. 1500–1750, Saints, Soldiers, Sovereigns, Spouses: Gender in the Renaissance and Baroque, and Women in the Renaissance.

Her scholarship centers on early modern Italian art, particularly women as artists, patrons, and collectors, with significant work on Catherine de’ Medici, Artemisia Gentileschi, portraiture, and tapestry. Notable publications include “Cosimo I and Catherine de’ Medici: Cousins and Rulers” in Brill’s Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici (forthcoming), “Artemisia Conquers Rhodes: Problems in the Representation of Female Military Heroics in the Age of Catherine de’ Medici” (2015), “Women Artists” in the Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (2013), “La Florentine or La bonne Françoise? Some Sixteenth-Century Commentators on Catherine de’ Medici and her Patronage” (2011), and “Learning to Be Looked at: The Portrait of [The Artist as] a Young Woman in Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia” (2005). She is currently working on The Portrait at Court: Catherine de’ Medici as Subject, Collector, and Observer. Ffolliott guest-curated Images of a Queen’s Power: The Artemisia Tapestries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1993) and contributed to the committee for Italian Women Artists: Renaissance to Baroque at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2007). Her contributions have earned her the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America (2025), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (2014), and the establishment of a book prize in her honor by the Sixteenth Century Society. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Shakespeare Library, Bunting Institute, and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Leadership roles include President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (1998), Vice Chair of the Medici Archive Project, and President of the American Friends of Attingham.