CARICATURE, a general term, adopted from the French, for the art of pictorial ridicule or satire of any kind, whether personal, social or political, de rived from the Italian word cari catura in the sense of a portrait in which characteristic features are ludicrously exaggerated.
The practice of personal caricature is at least as old as to be recorded by Aristotle and Aristophanes, both of whom tell us something of an artist named Pauson who made pictorial fun of people, and was made to suffer for it. Again, Pliny mentions two sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, who, by way of a joke, exhibited a portrait of the poet Hipponax, who was very ugly, for public ridi cule : the poet is said to have retaliated in satirical verse with such effect that the sculptors hanged themselves in despair. That none of these three appears to have benefited by his activities in this di rection very possibly accounts for the fact that the line of their successors, if they had any, is not traceable, and that among all the stories related by Vasari there are none that point to any survival of their baneful influence. Leonardo da Vinci made many wonderful drawings of distorted heads, but these we are told were life-like portraits carefully studied from actual freaks, and it is not until the close of the 16th century that we can begin to trace a regular unbroken pedigree for the art of Caricatura (the "ritratto ridicolo di cui siansi esagerati i difetti" as it is defined in the Nuova Enciclopedia) from the Carracci and their school in Bo logna, through Ghezzi, Townshend, Daumier, Dighton, "Ape" and "Spy," to its supreme living practitioner Max, and the very nu merous brood of stinging birds whom his revival of the art in the closing years of the last century undoubtedly did much to encourage.