Rise of Caricature

RISE OF CARICATURE Early Italian School.—In Bologna caricatura was the natural result of its artistic and popular "atmosphere." So at least says Count Malaguzzi-Valeri in a recent brochure, and he quotes with ' approval the opinion of Ludovico Frati (from an article in La Villa Cittadina, Nov. 1919) that when the history of caricature in Italy is studied as it has been in England, France and Ger many, Bologna will have one of the first places in it. The f oun dation of the vivacious Papagallo in the '8os of the last century proved that the old spirit was not extinguished, and a glance at its activities in the 17th and i8th centuries reveals a con siderable amount of material for such a history, which has some how escaped the attention both of the historians of caricaturists and of the Magnasco society. So far from being tenebroso, the school—the actual studio of the Carracci—appears to have sparkled with continuous outbursts of artistic humour. "I Carracci stessi amavan lo scherzo," says Malaguzzi, and they habitually indulged in artistic frivolities in the intervals of serious work. They began by introducing the use of linear symbols and asking their friends to guess what they represented—a practice possibly foreshadowing those of some of the modernists—and visitors to the studio were regarded as fair game for caricature, and saw themselves portrayed under the guise of dogs, pigs, beasts of burden, and even of inanimate objects like jugs or loaves of bread. Annibale Carracci himself was responsible for some of these, and his followers included Pietro Facini, Lionello Spada, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and, most prolific of all, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Eight large volumes of Mitelli's drawings, many of them caricatures, are in the library at Bologna, and a pair pre sented to the British Museum by Lawrence Binyon are of a quality that induces a strong desire to see some of the others.

None of these names is familiar—at least as a caricaturist— but thanks to the English engraver, Arthur Pond, who published a series of 24 prints in 1743, we have examples from drawings in private collections by Guercino, Francesco Mola and Carlo Maratti. Most of Pond's subjects, however, are by the then "famoso cavaliere Belle caricature," namely, Pietro Leone Ghezzi, who was renowned in Rome, not only among his fellow-country men, but also among foreigners for his caricature portraits.

To Pond we are also indebted for what is possibly the earliest example of pure caricature in Great Britain, a drawing made by Antoine Watteau when he was in London in 1720, of Dr. Misau bin, a French refugee who was so successful in his profession as to be branded by posterity as a quack. This drawing is said by Mariette to have been made in a coffee house, and it is not straining probability to suggest that the place may have been Button's, where Hogarth in his younger days made portrait sketches from the life. None of the work mentioned so far, it should be noted, was intended for publication, for caricatura was essentially personal, and it was only the vogue created by Ghezzi that led to the publication by Pond of his portraits of this class, and by Oesterreich of another series of about 40 at Potsdam in 1766. There is little if any malice in them, and they seem to have been done simply for the amusement of the subjects and their friends.

Rise of Political Caricature.

For the employment of this gentle art as an adjunct to political satire, it is not so easy as it may sound to find any absolute authority earlier than the middle of the i8th century. There may be one or two examples, but the prints of Chancellor Finch with a pair of wings behind him, in allusion to his flight from the country, or of Bishop Williams with a large blunderbuss, etc., and indeed of whole packs of cards representing individuals, in the 17th century, are purely symbolical in their satire, and cannot be said to attack the personal appear ance of the victim. This wicked practice would appear to have been introduced by George (afterwards Marquis) Townshend, and even if he cannot be discredited with the sole responsibility for such a monstrous extension of a private artistic diversion, we can at any rate produce illuminating evidence of it in his case. In June 1765 a letter appeared in The Public Advertiser dealing banteringly with Townshend's activities of this kind. After refer ring to the use of the rolling-press in producing satirical prints, the writer proceeds thus : "He has dealt his grotesque cards from house to house, from Town's End to Town's End. Is there a great general of the highest rank and most eminent military abilities ... ? If the size of his person as well as fame should be larger than ordinary, this malicious libeller at three strokes of his pencil scratches out his figure in all the ridiculous attitudes imagin able (duke of Cumberland). Is there a nobleman distinguished for wit, eloquence and learning? If his person be long and lank, lean and bony, he also is in the like manner exposed to ridicule (Lord Lyttleton). If the name of a Scotch peer bears the least resemblance of Boot, and his Christian name be John, a huge jack-boot serves for him on copperplate (Lord Bute). And if another lord bears the name of some animal (a fox, for instance) his features are assimilated perforce to those of the animal, and aggravated or distorted in the most ludicrous manner in order to produce a likeness between them." The personal note has made "caricature" in the broader, modern sense, a living thing. The older satirists merely personi fied institutions. The papacy was figured as a monster with the trunk of a woman, the head of a donkey, and a different symbol lurking in every limb. The Dutch prints that were so effective against Louis XIV. show us merely dolls representing the various crowned and coroneted heads of the period, and the English ones simply dummies with labels issuing from their mouths, inscribed with the right thing. There is no human interest in any of these designs, valuable as they are to the student and the collector.

Pictorial Satire.

For pictorial satire in general, claims have been advanced to an even greater antiquity than for carica tura, which cannot be lightly dismissed, although they must necessarily be accepted with considerable reserve. With the very old as with the very new, it is not always obvious to the spectator whether a joke is intended or not, and it is a dangerous subject on which to be too positive. Champfleury, who ransacked every corner of antiquity for materials for his Histoire tie la Caricature antique, turned away in despair from the Assyrian bas-reliefs; but are they a whit less solemn than those on the Albert Memo rial? Man, as he declares, has laughed, as he has wept, in every age : so why should we deny the possibility of the existence of Assyrian satirists who worked in less enduring materials than granite or marble? As it happens, the oldest example of pictorial humour put for ward by Thomas Wright in his History of Caricature is of a religious, not a political, subject and, what is still more interesting, there is good a posteriori evidence for accepting it for inclusion in the gallery of the satirical. For, whatever difficulties the extension of the term "caricature" in modern times has occasioned in deciding what is and what is not to be properly included within its limits, there is one strain constantly recurring in the modern family which is also prominent in antiquity, and which may therefore be accounted as of some genealogical significance, namely the representation of human beings with the heads of animals, or, more generally, investing them with animal characteristics.

It is in Egypt that we find the example in question, a painting in the tomb of King Rameses V., presumably as early as 110o B.C. It represents a soul condemned by Osiris to return to earth in the form of a pig, accompanied by two dog-headed monkeys. It may be that this is simply religious symbolism, but that need not exclude it from consideration here, for there is a definite histor ical, or, at least, traditional link between it and the famous Roman graffito of the Crucifixion, of the 3rd or 4th century A.D. In this the figure on the cross has the head of an ass, and a man con templates it in an attitude which is interpreted by the legend in Greek characters "Alexamenos worships God." At first sight this might seem to be a scoff directed against the Saviour Himself, but it probably has a more general significance. There was a definite belief among some of the Gentiles that the Jews secretly worshipped the image of an ass, or of an ass's head, but the Gnostics, who were possibly nearer the mark, maintained that the Jewish God Sabaoth was figured in the form of a man with the head of an ass.

Little less than religious belief was the Roman tradition of descent from Aeneas, and at Herculaneum we find something very similar to the Crucifixion graffito in an exact parody of a well-known group of Aeneas carrying Anchises and leading Asca nius from Troy, in which the figures are drawn with the heads and extremities of animals. Titian, some 1,200 years later, went even further than this in converting "the Laocoon" into a group of monkeys. In the animal strain, James Goupy satirized Handel "with a snout of a hog playing on an organ, with many symbols of gluttony round him," and Newton drew Wilton, the sculptor, with the head of an ass. None of these examples answers to the definition of caricatura—all are symbolic.

Conversely, Tenniel put the British Lion into trousers, while Landseer invested dogs of all sorts with every variety of human sentiment, whether he meant to or not. For this also there is good historical precedent, though hardly as ancient as the days of Rameses V. In some later Egyptian papyri are whole groups of animals performing human actions—notably a lion and a gazelle playing chess together, who are doubtless intended to typify a king and one of his ladies. The fox and the goose were taken to satirize monks and their dupes in the middle ages, and in later times apes for the admonition of humanity at large. Claude Gillot, and his more famous pupil, Antoine Watteau, festooned the way for the Victorian scientists with orgies of artistic anthropoids. "La Grande Singerie" and "La Petite Sin gerie" at Chantilly are developments of Gillot's numerous engrav ings, and Watteau, whether or not he actually painted these, has left us two simian satires, "La Peinture" and "La Sculpture." Christophe Huet, J. Gueland and Le Mire followed the lead, and even Chardin in 1740 exhibited "Le Singe Peintre" and "Le Singe Antiquaire." Seeing how many and how obvious are the resem blances between certain types of humanity and animal creation in general, it is no wonder if satirists of all ages have availed themselves freely of these opportunities. It is the same in litera ture, from Aesop to Gulliver, and on to Dr. Dolittle, while in conversation it is so common as to escape notice altogether. Is there any social circle that does not include a goose, an ass or a cow? The Effect of Printing.—But whether or not caricature and pictorial satire had even a single ancestor in common in remote ages, it is certain that the latter, unlike the former, depends chiefly for its existence on circulation ; and so we have to wait for the invention of the art of block printing on wood and of engraving and etching on copper bef ore we can begin to trace its history with any success. The earliest example mentioned in the British Museum catalogue of Italian engraving, which dates from about 146o, is neither religious nor political, being known as "The battle for the hose." It represents a group of richly attired ladies scuffling for the possession of a pair of trunk hose held aloft in a garland by two winged genii. Dr. Warburg has suggested that the specific idea is a popular illustration of the text of Isaiah iv. 1, thus bringing the prophets of Israel again within our range. Somewhat similar in subject is a slightly later German woodcut of a duel between a man and a woman, which is supposed to symbolize the eternal marital question: "Who shall wear the breeches?" Less abstruse are one or two satires against the Jews; but the surviving examples of the 1 Sth century (probably a mere percentage of such perishable and ephemeral material) are very few, and it is not until the Reformation, when Luther organized whole arsenals of pictorial artillery for his campaign against Rome, that we speak of it as fairly established.

Once the Reformation was established there may have been a less regular demand for satirical prints, though there was still intermittent firing; a contemporary Italian print of Diana and Calisto was altered by Peter Miricenys to represent the young Queen Elizabeth and the pope, the latter "uncovered by Time and Truth." Not until the end of the 17th century, when the Dutch followed Luther's example and employed Romeyn de Hooglie to satirize Louis XIV., did the stream begin to flow regularly and to swell into the great river it became in the time of the Georges.