Degree Programs

This two-semester, team-taught course, required of all first-year students in the M.A. program and entering Ph.D. students, traces major historical developments in the decorative and applied arts, landscape design, and material culture from antiquity to the present. Individual lectures familiarize students with significant forms, materials, sites, styles, designers, and craftsmen, while introducing a variety of scholarly approaches to recovering meaning from material artifacts through a study of function, technology, iconography, and patronage. At the end of the two-semester sequence, students will have a working visual and historical vocabulary of significant designed/manufactured objects and spaces from a wide range of civilizations and periods, and a better awareness of the areas they might pursue at the BGC. 3 credits.