Cartouche (design)

Italian design for a cartouche frame, 16th century

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]

In Early Modern design, 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 (illustration, left). Another cartouche figures prominently in the title page of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, framing a minor vignette with a device of pierced and scrolling papery cartoccia (see illustration).

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

GalleryEdit

Map of Greece and western Anatolia with a cartouche in the bottom left corner, drawn in 1791
Cartouche on a building from Lviv (Ukraine)
Cartouche on a Neo-Baroque city-house from Bucharest (Romania)
Cartouche on a building from Saint Petersburg (Russia)
Detail showing cartouche on the 1765 de l'Isle globe
A cartouche framing device on a London clockmaker's tradecard, circa 1760. Such a "card" (engraved on paper) would be pasted into a clockcase
Cartouche from the Forbidden City (Beijing, China)
Cartouche over door, Tyska Skolgränd in Stockholm (Sweden)