Article Outline
Cartoon, in the fine arts, a drawing made on paper in preparation for and in the same size as a painting, tapestry, mosaic, or piece of stained glass. Since the 1840s the term has come to also mean any humorous, satirical, or opinionated drawing, typically one printed in a newspaper or magazine, with or without a short text. Rather than the drawing, the text—cast within the cartoon as speech or set as a caption—may be the bearer of the joke or the witticism.
During the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century) in Italy, the custom of decorating wall surfaces with frescoes (large murals), which required teams of artists to work together, gave rise to the use of full-size preparatory drawings on stout paper as guidelines for the artists. These sketches were known as cartoni, from the Italian word for the paper on which they were drawn. When used as guides for frescoes, the drawings were transferred to a wall in one of two ways: either by pricking through the lines on the paper and then dusting black chalk or charcoal through the prick holes, or by laying the cartoon onto the fresh, soft plaster on the wall and pressing a stylus along the lines of the cartoon. Either method created an outline that served as a guide to the painters. Since the cartoon tended to be destroyed in the process or was subsequently discarded as serving no further purpose, few old cartoons have survived. Among those which have been preserved, the best known are by Italian painter Raphael, drawn about 1516 as designs for wall tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome; and The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Anne (1499?, National Gallery, London), by Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci.
The meaning of the word cartoon changed in the 1840s, when Prince Albert, who wanted to decorate the walls of the new Houses of Parliament in London with frescoes, opened a competition for their design. The cartoons for the frescoes, some of them absurd in their attempts to appear heroic, were exhibited in 1843 and parodied shortly thereafter in the English magazine Punch, thus earning the word cartoon its modern definition of a humorous or satirical drawing. The panel, a single drawing contained within a box-shaped outline, is the fundamental building block of all modern cartoons.
Depending on their purpose, most cartoons fall into one of several different categories: editorial cartoons, gag cartoons, illustrative cartoons, comic strips, and animated cartoons.
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