Our commitment to the cultural history of the material world involves concerted attention to what have traditionally been known as the decorative or applied arts, a broad category of objects and visual media that have always engaged the attention of major artists, designers, craftsmen, and patrons but that have become artificially separated from other forms of artistic production by modern disciplinary and institutional divisions. The BGC aims to heal this historical breach both by focusing on a wide range of individual media through specialized courses of study (on metalwork, furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, fashion, jewelry, or garden design, to name just a few) and by reintegrating these media into broader thematic, chronological, and geographical studies. Beautiful, but by their very nature also usable—or potentially usable— objects in domestic, liturgical, and/or public settings, works of "decorative" art prove particularly fruitful as evidence of past beliefs, ideals, and social practices. By the same token, the fact that many such objects are the result of artistic collaboration among multiple specialists makes them ideal in reconstructing economic and commercial as well as aesthetic networks. In its study of these often marginalized media, the BGC thus aims to lead the growing interest in expanding the repertoire of historical, cultural, and art-historical investigation in search of a richer and more accurate understanding of the visual and material culture of the past.
