1. What’s the real message?
Political cartoons
What you’ll need today:
-Smart Device (if you have one, no worries if you don’t!)
-Highlighters
-Pencil or Pen
-2 political cartoons
What’s the real message?

2. Political cartoons…
Political cartoons are for the most part composed of two elements: caricature, which parodies the individual, and allusion, which creates the situation or context into which the individual is placed.

3. Historically speaking…
Caricature as a Western discipline goes back to Leonardo da Vinci's artistic explorations of "the ideal type of deformity"-- the grotesque-- which he used to better understand the concept of ideal beauty .
Werner Hoffman, Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957) 16.

4. Over time the principles of form established in part by Leonardo had become so ingrained into the method of portraiture that artists like Agostino and Annibale Carracci rebelled against them. Intended to be lighthearted satires, their caricatures were, in essence, "counter-art".
The sketch of "A Captain of Pope Urban VIII" is representative of the new genre in that it is a quick, impressionistic drawing that exaggerates prominent physical characteristics to humorous effect.
At its best, it brings out the subject's inner self in a kind of physiognomical satire-- as the example presented here seems to be a comment on some facet of the Captain's masculinity.

5. Cartoons…
Let’s take a look at the historical evolution of political cartoons! 5g

6. American Political Cartoons…
Benjamin Franklin's "Join or Die", which depicts a snake whose severed parts represent the Colonies, is acknowledged as the first political cartoon in America. The image had an explicitly political purpose from the start, as Franklin used it in support of his plan for an intercolonial association to deal with the Iroquois at the Albany Congress of It came to be published in "virtually every newspaper on the continent"; reasons for its widespread currency include its demagogic reference to an Indian threat as well as its basis in the popular superstition that a dead snake would come back to life if the pieces were placed next to each other

7. Analyzing Political cartoons
Step #1: Observe
Describe what you see. What do you notice first? What people and objects are shown? What, if any, words do you see? What do you see that looks different that it would in a photograph? What do you see that might refer to another work of art or literature? What symbols do you see?

8. Analyzing Political cartoons
Step #2: reflect
What’s happening in the cartoon? What was happening when this cartoon was made? Who do you think was the audience for this cartoon? What issue do you think the cartoon is about? What do you think the cartoonist’s opinion on this issue is? What methods does the cartoonist use to persuade the audience?

9. Analyzing Political cartoons
Step #3: Question
What do you wonder about? Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?