The less personal and caricature-like features of the modern cartoon developed slowly through the 16th century and up to the last third of the 17th. In part consciously based on Bosch and Bruegel, in part an autonomous protest against the Renaissance belief in order, symmetry, and fixed canons of beauty, there rose a European family of grotesqueries with sources as mixed as its appearance. Its only visible overall characteristic might be said to be that it reacted, from the depth of old folkways, against the novelty of the Renaissance, the New World, and the various hierarchies. Echoes of the dark Gothic forests mixed with fantastic reports of travel (some of them not really new but rehashed from Marco Polo) and with travesties of the Renaissance ornament of such works as Raphael’s decorations for the loggias of the Vatican Palace. One result was the double images of faces and landscape or of human figures built of books, fish, or pots and pans by the 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In a slightly different area lay two types of pictorial comedy. The first type was the conscious satire by professional printmakers, illustrating such works as the Ship of Fools (1494), an allegory by the German poet Sebastian Brant, or issued as independent prints. Some of them were tendentious to the point of libel (such were Lucas Cranach’s attacks on the papacy, inspired by Martin Luther); others were merely mockery, such as the 16th-century German painter Hans Beham’s satirical view of mercenary soldiers and their camp followers. The second type was the unconscious pictorial comedy by comparatively untutored practitioners of woodcut or etching, hastily made and issued as newspaper extras might be issued now. These works were the ancestors of 18th- and 19th-century broadsides.

If caricature deals with the individual and with what makes him individual, cartoons may be said to deal with groups and with their corporate characteristics; both are connected with the Renaissance love of classification and categorizing. Up to the time in the mid-17th century when both caricature and cartoon jelled in forms which answer to the modern definition, caricature had been prepared on the whole by knowledgeable artists; and cartoons had been prepared (though often with the assistance of professional artists) at a somewhat lower level. Thereafter, cartoons (in the modern sense of the term) came to be created in response not merely to artistic impulses but to the same sorting-out impulses that were creating the modern state and its society, its science, and its religion. Besides the sublime–ridiculous and the artist–layperson dualisms in this field, there is a sort of class dualism that is a result of historical factors rather than of general human disposition. The history of caricature and cartoon is intimately connected with the history of the way in which one class has looked at another. Dürer looked down on the heavy-bodied man whom he called farmerish; yet within two generations Bruegel was drawing peasants in a sympathetic manner (see photograph). A 16th-century Swiss engraver, Jost Amman, treated trades and professions dispassionately, as did the 17th-century French engraver Abraham Bosse, although Bosse did create some lampoons on unpopular types and callings. Jacques Callot, an early 17th-century French etcher, satirized dandies, beggars, and all classes between, and he even made the generally detested Gypsies (who were not yet romantic) almost sympathetic.

A rather comfortable social climate developed in the 17th century: the wars of religion had quieted in France and the Low Countries, though civil war occupied Britain in the middle of the century. But by the time the Restoration had quieted Britain, a general European threat appeared in the form of Louis XIV. Against his absolutism and against his influence through agents in Britain and the Netherlands, the first modern cartoon campaign was made. It was modern in that it was on a large scale—cartoons were published on a fairly regular serial basis, much like that of the modern daily newspaper’s editorial cartoon (though the newspaper was still in the letter-and-gazette stage); and it was based on a fairly large and general acquaintance with the persons satirized if not always with the literary analogies used. The cartoons, which as yet made no particular use of personal caricature (that was still on a friendly studio footing), were prints made in Holland by a group of artists of whom Romeyn de Hooghe was the chief, and they were sold cheap. There had been Dutch political cartoons before, but they were laborious and appeared irregularly. The Dutch–English connection in the person of William III, the continuing threat of Louis XIV, and a succession of shattering events in various spheres stimulated a vast production of cartoons from the 1680s on.

As the cartoon spread—along with its almost indispensable element, caricature—it began to divide; and although the periodical carrying cartoons was not to appear regularly until the third quarter of the 18th century, nor the true comic periodical until early in the 19th century, the divisions were real enough to follow from that time.

18th century

About 1740 the English printmaker Arthur Pond published together 25 caricatures after original drawings by a number of artists. This collection must have been effective in spreading the idea and the word, for it was an excellent publication. Pier Leone Ghezzi, one of the artists included, was probably the first professional caricaturist, for he made a living with his pen portraits of Romans and visitors to Rome, many of which he engraved. He was a minor master in comparison to his contemporary the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, yet the caricatures by the latter, delightful though they are, appear to deal with types or at least with anonymous individuals rather than with nameable ones. Tiepolo’s pen-and-wash drawings were a small side issue in his enormous production, and they were not engraved or otherwise multiplied in his lifetime. Both artists had an eye for ungainly legs and posture and for odd clothing and the obvious features of the face.

On the heels of Pond’s reproductions came handbill-like personal caricatures. Apparently begun in the 1760s by the Englishman George Townshend (later Marquess Townshend), these were comic portraits with punning titles or accessories, intended by disingenuous means to avoid being outright libellous. A flood of imitations followed. Soon Townshend’s cards became comic illustrations in magazines such as The London Magazine, the Political Register, and the Town and Country Magazine.