Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

MATERIALS & METHODS

Drawing

Cartoon
A full-size drawing made for the purpose of transferring a design to a painting or tapestry or other large work. The earlier painters of fresco simply drew freehand on the wall or copied from a small sketch, but a cartoon was indispensable in the process of making stained glass, and it was perhaps from this art that the painters borrowed it. Some frescos of the early 15th cent. show clearly that their designs have been traced from cartoons, for their outlines are either indented or punctuated with pin-pricks. The method is described by Vasari. The drawing was made on stout paper, usually with charcoal or chalk, and sometimes heightened with white or coloured with water-colours. It was then cut into sections. The section which was wanted for the day's painting was laid against the soft fresh plaster of the wall and a stylus was pressed heavily along the lines, or else pricks were made at intervals and powdered charcoal was rubbed through the holes--a process called 'pouncing'.

Cartoons were used for easel paintings as well as frescos. A well-known example is Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St John (NG, London). Another, unusually small, is Raphael's pen-and-ink drawing The Vision of a Knight , which hangs in the National Gallery, London, beside the little panel painting which was made from it. For tapestries, cartoons were made in full colour; famous examples are the series on the Acts of the Apostles lent from the Royal Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, painted in distemper by Raphael and his pupils in 1515-16 as designs for tapestries woven for the Sistine Chapel.

In the 19th cent. designs submitted in a competition for frescos in the British Houses of Parliament were parodied in Punch. From this the word 'cartoon' acquired its present popular meaning of a humorous drawing or parody.

[Chilvers, Ian, Harold Osborne, and Dennis Farr, eds. Oxford Dictionary Of Art. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.]







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