It is an image made with exaggerated features, overloaded, often as a mockery. For some of these characteristics it is also an Americanism for humorous cartoons, and also a way of calling a contradicted figure, something that does not become as it should but pretends. The name comes from the Italian caricare ( "to carry" [in this case the features of the portrait]), with the suffix for deverbales -tura; which passes into French and English, and then into Spanish and Portuguese during the eighteenth century.