caricature

=**Caricature**=

A verbal description, the purpose of which is to exaggerate or distort, for comic effect, a person's distinctive physical features or other characteristics


Example: Will Smith Caricature [|www.dimpleart.com]

Literary Example:

"Likeness and distortion in painting have a number of roots in caricature where the sacredness of the picture gives way to flapping ears and bulbous noses: to laughs. From Odysseus or Heracles dressed up as fools on Greek vase paintings to ribald woodcuts ordered by Luther depicting the Pope, caricature has served the dual purposes of humor and politics.

Ernst Gombrich, in "The Principles of Caricature," to which I owe much of the ideas contained in this short essay, describes copiers of manuscripts illuminating margins with fantastic creatures. In combining the sacred and the profane in these texts he wonders, 'Was it a belief in some magic power to ward off the evil spirit, or just an innocent desire to indulge their sense of fun? Are the weird gargoyles awesome spells or merely facetious inventions?' These same questions I tried to turn on the painters of my story, perhaps hinting at a similar conclusion to Gombrich's, that 'perhaps one alternative does not exclude the other.' "

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**ACurtis**

 * Period 4**