Cartoon

Cartoon, in the fine and applied arts, a full-sized scheme or drawing used as the model for a work to be executed; the work may be an easel painting, fresco, mosaic, tapestry, stained-glass window, sculpture, or other object. The cartoon (from the Italian cartone, “pasteboard”) allows the artist to plan the design before beginning work on the actual project, making alterations and adjustments to the cartoon beforehand as necessary.

A cartoon must be the same size as the work to be created. The precise way in which it is used depends on the medium in which the artist is working. For a fresco, the design on the cartoon is transferred to the plaster or other permanent surface in one of two ways: by rubbing the back with charcoal and chalk and then tracing the design on the front with a hard point; or by pouncing, pressing charcoal dust through pinpricks delineating the design. In tapestry weaving, in which a coloured cartoon is used, the cartoon is placed under the warp (longitudinal) threads on a low-warp loom; for a high-warp loom, it is placed behind the weaver who works from its reflection in a mirror. For sculpture, the artist makes very accurate measurements on the uncut stone, based on the shapes outlined in the cartoon.

A cartoon for an oil painting or fresco can be a line drawing or a finished chiaroscuro study. The cartoons drawn by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea Mantegna, and other great masters of the Renaissance as guides for almost all their works are often as interesting artistically as the completed frescoes and panels. They were highly valued and were often regarded as independent works of art. In his Lives of the Artists, the Renaissance painter, architect, and biographer Giorgio Vasari recounts how crowds came to view Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon for his oil painting of the Virgin and St Anne.

Today the term “cartoon” also applies to a pictorial sketch or caricature, by implication humorous or satirical, and usually published in a magazine, newspaper, or comic. This alternative meaning came about in the 19th century, when designs (cartoons in the original sense) for frescoes for the Houses of Parliament in London were parodied in Punch, the humorous magazine. See also Cartoon (humorous drawing).