Caricature

Caricature is a depiction of a person, object or situation in which characteristic features are deliberately distorted and exaggerated for comic, satirical or exposing effect. Most often it is a portrait in which the artist sharpens the recognizable peculiarities of the sitter's face and figure in order to ridicule them or to capture the very essence of their character. The word derives from the Italian caricare, 'to load' or 'to exaggerate'. Caricature balances between good-natured humour and a sharp political weapon. As a conscious genre, caricature took shape in Italy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably in the work of the Carracci brothers and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it flourished through printmaking: the Englishmen William Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, and later the Frenchman Honore Daumier, turned caricature into an influential means of social and political criticism, mercilessly mocking authority, hypocrisy and the vices of the age. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries caricature became firmly rooted in newspapers, magazines and digital media as political cartooning, remaining a powerful and sometimes dangerous instrument of free speech.