The Encyclopédie and the Idea of the Decorative Arts

The decorative arts do not appear as a category of useful knowledge in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie but those arts now called decorative arts, such as cabinet‐making, were central to the eighteenth‐century Parisian economy and a defining feature of a publication which set itself the task of raising the status of the useful arts. This essay explores the antecedents of the notion of the decorative arts in the history of ideas. By comparing Renaissance, baroque and enlightened art theory, it charts the faltering emergence of a definition of arts such as marquetry that no longer sees them as either materially or procedurally dependent on the finer arts of painting or architecture. In the subtle shifts of meaning the object gives way to the maker as principal element upon which the definition of an art turns.