Cartoon

A cartoon, in its original art-historical sense, is a full-scale preparatory drawing used to transfer a composition onto its final support — a wall for fresco, a panel, or a loom for tapestry weaving. The design was pricked with small holes or scored along its lines, then dusted with powdered charcoal ("pouncing") or incised, so the composition could be stamped through directly onto the working surface. Raphael's ten cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries, painted in gouache on paper around 1515–16 for weaving in Brussels, are the most famous surviving example: monumental works of art in their own right, they demonstrate that a cartoon was never a mere technical aid but a complete, exhibition-worthy statement of a composition before its execution in another medium.