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]

Cartouche on a Neo-Baroque city-house from Bucharest (Romania)

Since the early 16th century, the cartouche is a scrolling frame device, derived originally from Italian cartoccia. Such cartouches are characteristically stretched, pierced and scrolling. 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 device of pierced and scrolling papery cartoccia.

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.

  • Title Plate, from Livre Nouveau de Fleurs Tres-Util, with a big Baroque cartouche, decorated with festoons, horns of abundance, and a mascaron, 1645, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
  • Cartouche containing an empty shield surmounted by a lion and framed by a lion and a child, by Stefano della Bella, 1646, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Etching of a cartouche framed by ducks and weeds, by Stefano della Bella, 1647, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Design of a cartouche, by Stefano della Bella, 1647, in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio, US)
  • Etching of a complex cartouche, by Bernard Turreau, 1716, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Frontispiece for 'Figures French and comic' (Figures francoises et comiques), by Robert Hecquet, 18th century, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • The Forges of Vulcan, from the Book of Cartouches, probably by François Boucher, mid-18th century, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Cartouche decorated with horns of plenty, an architectural ornament of the Louvre
  • Cartouche in a pediment above the entrance of Hala Traian from Bucharest (Romania)
  • Cartouche with a monogram of ZNS, surrounded by Neo-Renaissance ornaments, in some kind of a Venetian window-relief, on the wall of a house from Bucharest
  • Neo-Renaissance ornaments above a door, in the center a cartouche, in the D.A. Sturdza House (Cărturești Verona when the photo was taken), each door having the same thing above them, in Bucharest
  • Cartouche surrounded by a pair of festoons made of flowers, in Bucharest
  • Neo-Baroque cartouche-window with a male mascaron, in Bucharest
  • A cartouche above a Neo-Baroque door and a smaller one in its middle, in the House of Scientists (Lviv)
  • Cartouche that consists of three angels with clouds surrounding them, above a door in France
  • Cartouche with a caduceus, on the roof of the Crédit Lyonnais headquarters (Paris)

See also

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.
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