While watching “Rugrats” this morning my daughter came up to me and asked, “why are they called ‘cartoons’?”. “Well honey, they’re called that because. . .” duh. Ahhh. Well. . . boy. I went and looked on-line but they talked about how the first cartoons were political drawings back in 18something-or-other. But they don’t say what “cartoon” stands for. I assume the Car part is short for Caricature. But the toon part I just don’t know.
According to Dictionary.com:
Preliminary drawings for paintings were/are also called cartoons from the same Italian root.
Rugrats, by the way, is an animated cartoon.
When I went to the Leonardo diVinci exhibit at the Met last weekend, all of his life-size sketches were called cartoons. Don’t know how that applies, but it’s the oldest medium I have seen the term used to describe a drawing.
In Italian, carta means ‘paper’. The augmentative suffix is -one. So cartone means literally ‘a big piece of paper’. That’s exactly what it was for the Renaissance fresco muralists.
Fresco was paint applied to wet fresh plaster. It had to be applied very swiftly before the plaster dried out. A master artist used all his students to help get the paint onto the wall. To speed up the process, the outlines of the painting were drawn on a big piece of paper, the cartone. They used sharp sticks to poke little holes all around the outlines. They put the cartone up to the wall and dusted it all over with colored powder. Then took the paper down and rapidly painted in all the lines based on the powder dots.
I guess over time the concept of ‘simplified sketch on paper’ was transferred from this fresco technique to any kind of simplified sketch.
All the posters here are contributing pieces of the puzzle, so I’ll put them in a more in depth context. Cartoons (the word itself derived from the Italian carta, paper) originally referred to preliminary drawings made by artists, which were the same size as the intended final project. This was a standard step in the process of painting larger frescos, for instance, and were typically discarded once the final project was completed; surviving cartoons are quite rare and provide invaluable insights into the artists’ processes. Some of the more famous surviving cartoons are from Raphael’s “School of Athens” (now in Milan), a copy of Michelangelo’s cartoon for “The Battle of Cascina” by San Gallo, and Da Vinci’s “Virgin & Child w/St. Anne and John the Baptist.”
The OED tells us that by the mid-19th century “cartoon” was appropriated to mean an editorial cartoon – with its first documented use in Punch in 1843. It was a quick jump from this to 1916, when it was first used to mean an animated cartoon. And thus you have a straight line from Michelangelo to Rugrats, though you won’t hear any lame TMNT jokes from me on the matter.
Beat ya to it!