Cartouche (design)

A cartouche (also cartouch) is an oval or oblong design with a slightly convex surface, typically edged with ornamental scrollwork. It is used to hold a painted or low-relief design.[1] Since the early 16th century, the cartouche is a scrolling frame device, derived originally from Italian cartuccia. Such cartouches are characteristically stretched, pierced and scrolling.

Cartouche on a Neo-Baroque house from Bucharest, Romania

Another cartouche figures prominently in the 16th-century title page of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, framing a minor vignette with a pierced and scrolling papery cartouche.

The engraved trade card of the London clockmaker Percy Webster shows a vignette of the shop in a scrolling cartouche frame of Rococo design that is composed entirely of scrolling devices.

Gallery

• 
  Baroque cartouche, with festoons, cornucopias and mascaron, 1645, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Lion cartouche Stefano della Bella, 1646, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Duck cartouche by Stefano della Bella, 1647, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Design of a cartouche, by Stefano della Bella, 1647, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
• 
  Etching of a complex cartouche, by Bernard Turreau, 1716, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Frontispiece for Figures françoises et comiques by Robert Hecquet, 18th century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  The Forges of Vulcan, probably by François Boucher, mid-18th century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  Cartouche decorated with horns of plenty, an architectural ornament of the Louvre
• 
  Cartouche in a pediment of Hala Traian, Bucharest, Romania
• 
  Cartouche with a monogram of ZNS, with Neo-Renaissance ornaments, in a Venetian window-like relief, on a house, Bucharest
• 
  Neo-Renaissance ornaments above a door: in the center a cartouche, in the D.A. Sturdza House (Cărturești Verona), Bucharest
• 
  Cartouche surrounded by floral festoons, Bucharest
• 
  Neo-Baroque cartouche-window with a male mascaron, Bucharest
• 
  A cartouche above a Neo-Baroque door and a smaller one below, the House of Scientists, Lviv
• 
  Cartouche with angels and clouds, above a door, France
• 
  Cartouche with a caduceus, on the roof of the Crédit Lyonnais headquarters, Paris

See also

• Tondo (art): round (circular)
• Medallion (architecture): round or oval
• Architectural sculpture
• Cartouche (cartography)
• Resist: a technique in ceramics to highlight cartouches, etc.

Footnotes

1. Ching, Francis D.K. (1995). A Visual Dictionary of Architecture. New York: John Wiley and Sons. p. 183. ISBN 0-471-28451-3.

External links