TITLES IN CARTOUCHES: AN IMAGE
IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
Detail of plate 34, Americae sive novi orbis, nova descriptio, from Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp: Christoffel Plantijn, 1587; 1st ed.
Coppenium Diesth, 1570). The title cartouches were copied from the pattern books of Italian Renaissance sculptors. Courtesy of the Department of Special
Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gift of Dr. Seymour Schwartz (CA 15509 plate 2).
in the sixteenth century, first to take in the title and soon other
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries the cartouche
became one of the standard components of the ornamental
facts about the map, such as the scale (about 1580), and later the
vocabulary of artists and craftsmen throughout Europe, not only of
dedication, signature, date, imprint, and other information.
The first form of cartouche was based on “strapwork” design,
cartographers. However, as Edward Lynam assured, “The cartouches
of maps became a special branch of art.” Though a French word,
imitating the ends of interwoven lengths of soft leather with edges
cartouche derives from the Italian cartoccio, meaning a roll or
curling forward all around the inscription. By 1550 the cartouche
twist of paper. In the early sixteenth century French and German
was a large rectangle with curved and curled pieces in relief that
cartographers introduced the first decorated titles on maps in the
imitated carved wood. Flemish and Dutch cartography, especially
upper margin, but only as a simple text inscribed in a flying scroll—
after Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570;
actually, in a cartoccio. Cartouches, as panels surrounded by an
plate 34), indiscri