156 CARICATURE, 



insistence upon fact. You cannot injure your neighbour 

 better than by telling the truth about him, if the truth is to 

 his discredit. You cannot make him appear ridiculous more 

 crushingly than by calling attention to real faults in his 

 physique. 



Those extraordinary caricatures of human faces which 

 Lionardo da Vinci delighted to produce, illustrate both 

 methods of emphasis and distortion. But they also exhibit 

 the play of a fantastic imagination. He accentuated the 

 analogies of human with bestial features, or degraded his 

 models to the level of goitred idiots by subtle blurrings and 

 erasures of their nobler traits. 



Caricature is not identical with satire. Caricature implies 

 exaggeration of some sort. The bitterest satire hits its 

 mark by no exaggeration, but by indignant and unmerciful 

 exposure of ignobility. Yet caricature has always been used 

 for satirical purposes, with notable effect by Aristophanes in 

 his political comedies, with coarse vigour by Gilray in 

 lampoons of the last century, with indulgent humour by our 

 contemporary 'Punch.' 



The real aim of caricature is to depreciate its object by 

 evoking contempt or stirring laughter, when the imaginative 

 rendering of the person is an unmistakable portrait, but 

 defects are brought into relief which might otherwise have 

 escaped notice. Instead therefore of being realistic, this 

 branch of art must be reckoned as essentially idealistic. In 

 so far as a caricature is powerfully conceived, it calls into 

 play fine, though never the noblest, never the most amiable, 

 qualities of interpretation. 



II 



The fantastic need have no element of caricature. It 

 invariably implies a certain exaggeration or distortion of 

 nature ; but it lacks that deliberate intention to disparage 

 which lies at the root of caricature. What we call fantastic 

 in art results from an exercise of the capricious fancy, playing 

 with things which it combines into arbitrary non-existent 

 forms. These may be merely graceful, as is the case with 



