Antonio Tempesta - Jachtsscène met heer een dame toekijkend

A cartouche or cartouch is an oval design with a slightly convex surface, typically edged with ornamental scrollwork. It is used to hold a painted or low relief design. In Early Modern design, since the early 16th century, the cartouche is a scrolling frame device, derived originally from Italian cartoccia. Such cartouches are characteristically stretched, pierced and scrolling (illustration, left). Another cartouche figures prominently in the title page of Giorgio Vasari's Lives, framing a minor vignette with a device of pierced and scrolling papery cartoccia.

Antonio Tempesta (1555 – 1630), was an Italian painter and engraver, whose art connects Baroque Rome and the Flemish culture of Antwerp was born in Florence. He enrolled in the Florentine Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1576. He was a pupil of Santi di Tito, then of the Flemish painter Joannes Stradanus. He was part of the large team of artists working under Giorgio Vasari on the interior decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. He painted a series of turbulent and crowded battle scenes for the Medici. He also completed a series of engravings on outdoor courtly hunting scenes. When in Rome, he associated with artists from the Habsburg Netherlands. Tempesta is now best known as a printmaker in etching and engraving. He also drew many designs for tapestries.

Printmaking in woodcut and engraving came to Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s, the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) used the technique. Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, 1460–1490. Print copying was a widely accepted practice, as well as copying of paintings viewed as images in their own right.