A cartoon is a full-size preparatory drawing used to transfer a composition to fresco, tapestry, or panel. From Raphael's Vatican Cartoons to Leonardo's drawings, learn how they worked.
In 1515, Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a set of tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. Raphael did not weave tapestries. He painted full-scale designs on paper, each over 3 meters tall and up to 5 meters wide, assembled from more than 200 sheets glued together. These designs, called cartoons, were sent to Brussels where weavers translated them into silk and wool tapestries. The cartoons themselves survived, and today they are displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where they are considered one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance in Britain. The word "cartoon" now means a humorous drawing or an animated film, but for 400 years before that usage existed, a cartoon was a serious, large-scale preparatory drawing, and some of the most important works of Western art began as one.
A cartoon, in art, is a full-size preparatory drawing made to transfer a composition onto a final surface, typically a wall for fresco, a panel for painting, or a loom for tapestry. The word comes from the Italian "cartone," meaning large paper, from "carta," paper. Cartoons allowed artists to work out compositions at full scale before committing to the final medium, where mistakes were costly or impossible to correct. In fresco painting, the cartoon was the reference for transferring the design onto wet plaster. In tapestry production, the cartoon was the full-scale pattern that weavers followed.
This entry covers what cartoons are, how they were used in fresco and tapestry production, the key artists who made them, and how the technique evolved from the Renaissance to the modern era.
A cartoon serves one primary function: it lets the artist work out the full composition at actual size before executing it in the final medium. This matters because fresco painting is irreversible. Once pigment is applied to wet plaster, it cannot be erased or painted over. The plaster dries in hours, and the painter must work quickly within each daily section, or giornata. The cartoon is the plan that makes this possible. The artist draws every figure, every drapery fold, every architectural detail at full scale on paper, then transfers the drawing to the wall.
Two main transfer methods were used. The first is pouncing. The artist pricks small holes along the outlines of the cartoon drawing with a pin or needle. The cartoon is held against the wall, and a bag of charcoal powder (called pounce) is dabbed or patted through the holes, leaving a dotted outline on the plaster surface. The artist then connects the dots with paint. The second method is incision. The cartoon is laid against the wall and a stylus is pressed along the outlines, incising the design directly into the wet plaster. This method leaves visible grooves in the plaster that can still be seen in some frescoes today.
In fresco painting, the cartoon was typically transferred to the arriccio, the rough undercoat of plaster, using sinopia, a reddish-brown pigment. This underdrawing, called a sinopia, served as a guide for where to apply the final layer of plaster (the intonaco) each day. The cartoon could also be transferred directly to the intonaco before painting began. Many cartoons were reused for multiple frescoes, and they deteriorated through repeated pouncing and handling. This is one reason so few original cartoons survive.
The use of cartoons in fresco became standard practice in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries. Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua (1303-1305) were prepared using full-scale drawings, though the cartoons themselves do not survive. By the early Renaissance, the cartoon had become an essential tool for any large-scale fresco commission.
Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (1495-1498, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan) was prepared using a cartoon. Technical studies of the painting have revealed incision marks beneath the paint surface, indicating that Leonardo transferred the composition from a cartoon by incising into the dry plaster. This is unusual because The Last Supper is not a true fresco. Leonardo experimented with an oil-and-tempera medium on dry plaster, which is why the painting has deteriorated so badly. But the cartoon transfer technique was the same as in buon fresco.
Michelangelo made extensive cartoons for the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512). According to Vasari, Michelangelo burned many of his drawings and cartoons before his death, apparently not wanting the public to see the labor behind the finished work. Only a few preparatory drawings survive, including studies in black and red chalk at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem and the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. The Web Gallery of Art's collection of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel studies shows the progression from small figure studies to the full-scale cartoons that would have been used for transfer.
Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican Stanze, including the School of Athens (1508-1511), were also prepared using cartoons. Raphael's cartoons were more carefully preserved than Michelangelo's, and the surviving fragments show the level of detail that went into these preparatory drawings. The cartoons were not rough sketches but highly finished drawings, sometimes in full color, that served as the definitive version of the composition.
The most famous surviving cartoons are the seven Raphael Cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1515, these cartoons were full-scale designs for tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, intended to hang in the Sistine Chapel on special occasions. Raphael painted the cartoons in glue distemper on paper, with each cartoon assembled from more than 200 sheets glued together. The cartoons are mirror images of the finished tapestries, because low-warp looms produce a reversed image of the design.
The V&A's history of the Raphael Cartoons documents the commission in detail. Raphael was paid 1,000 ducats for the cartoons, while the tapestries themselves cost 15,000 ducats to weave in Brussels. The cartoons were completed in 1516 and sent to the workshop of Pieter van Aelst, where weavers used them as patterns. The weavers pricked pinholes around the outlines of figures to transfer the design to the loom, and these pinpricks are still visible on the cartoons today.
In 2019, the V&A partnered with the Factum Foundation to create high-resolution color, infrared, and 3D scans of the cartoons. The Smithsonian Magazine report on the scanning project describes how the infrared scans revealed charcoal underdrawings beneath the painted surface, showing Raphael's revision process. The scans also revealed the pinpricks made by the Brussels weavers, providing a physical record of the transfer from cartoon to tapestry.
The Raphael Cartoons were described in the 18th and 19th centuries as "the Parthenon sculptures of modern art." They were reproduced widely in print form and became known to every artist of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Their influence on European painting was enormous, partly because they were accessible in a way that frescoes fixed to walls in Rome were not.
Cartoons were not limited to fresco and tapestry. Panel painters also used full-scale cartoons to transfer compositions, particularly for large altarpieces. The cartoon was laid on the panel and the design was transferred by pouncing or by tracing with a stylus. This ensured that the composition on the panel matched the artist's final drawing exactly.
In stained glass production, cartoons served the same function as in tapestry: they were the full-scale pattern that the glass cutters followed. A cartoon for a stained glass window showed the exact shapes of each piece of glass, the colors to be used, and the painted details that would be applied to the glass surface. The stained glass tradition relied on cartoons as much as fresco did.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the meaning of "cartoon" shifted. The word came to refer to humorous or satirical drawings, particularly editorial illustrations in newspapers and magazines. This usage dates to 1843, when Punch magazine published a satirical drawing by John Leech and called it a "cartoon" in reference to the fresco cartoons submitted for the new Houses of Parliament. The joke stuck, and the humorous meaning eventually displaced the artistic one in popular usage. But in art history and conservation, "cartoon" still means a full-size preparatory drawing.
Raphael is the artist most closely associated with cartoons, because his seven surviving tapestry cartoons are the best-preserved examples of the form. The cartoons demonstrate Raphael's ability to design compositions that would translate effectively from paint to woven textile. He simplified his forms and emphasized broad, clear shapes that weavers could reproduce, while maintaining the compositional sophistication that made him the most celebrated painter in Rome.
Michelangelo made cartoons for the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Last Judgment, but destroyed most of them. His surviving preparatory drawings show that he used cartoons to work out the complex poses and foreshortening of his figures before committing them to plaster. The few surviving studies, in black and red chalk, are among the most treasured drawings in Western art.
Leonardo used cartoons for his major commissions, including The Last Supper and the unfinished Battle of Anghiari. A famous cartoon by Leonardo, the Burlington House Cartoon (c. 1499-1500, National Gallery, London), shows the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. It is a full-scale preparatory drawing on paper, executed in charcoal and black and white chalk, and it is one of the few surviving cartoons from the Renaissance that was not made for transfer to another medium but as an independent work.
Rubens made cartoons for tapestry commissions later in his career. The History of Constantine tapestry series, designed by Rubens in the 1620s, was produced from full-scale cartoons painted in oil on paper. Rubens's cartoons show the continuation of the Raphael tradition into the Baroque period.
The Raphael Cartoons at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are the single best place to see original Renaissance cartoons. Seven cartoons are displayed in the Raphael Court, which was refurbished in 2020 to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael's death. The gallery allows close inspection of the painted surface, the pinpricks from the Brussels weavers, and the joins between the sheets of paper. The V&A's online interactive tool, Explore the Raphael Cartoons, provides high-resolution scans that reveal details invisible to the naked eye.
For cartoons in their fresco context, visit the Sistine Chapel to see the finished works that Michelangelo and Raphael's cartoons produced. In Padua, the Arena Chapel shows Giotto's frescoes, where the sinopia underdrawings beneath the fresco surface reveal the transfer process. For more on the fresco technique that cartoons served, read our entry on fresco. For the underdrawing technique that preceded the cartoon on the wall, see sinopia. And for the broader context of Renaissance art, read our post on Renaissance art and the birth of modern art, or explore our guide to reading a painting.
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