Short answers, pulled from the story.
Caricature derives from the Italian caricare, meaning to charge or load, making a caricature essentially a loaded portrait. The earliest known definition in English appeared in Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, published posthumously in 1716.
Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755) is widely considered the father of modern caricature. He was an Italian Rococo artist and theater designer who popularized caricatura as an art form in 18th-century Italy, inspiring its adoption across Europe.
England's liberal political traditions and relatively free press gave caricature room to develop as political satire. James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson both established their reputations working as hired caricaturists during the 1784 Westminster election, and both became leading political artists during the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
Susan Brennan defined caricature in her 1982 master's thesis as the process of exaggerating differences from an average face. Her system subtracted a person's facial features from a mean face, scaled the difference by a factor greater than one, and added the result back onto the mean face.
Yes. Rhodes, Brennan, and Carey demonstrated that caricatures were recognized more accurately than the original images using line drawings, and Benson and Perrett found similar results with photographic-quality images.
Notable museums dedicated to caricature include the Museo de la Caricatura in Mexico City, the Muzeum Karykatury in Warsaw, the Caricatura Museum Frankfurt, the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, and the Cartoonmuseum in Basel. The first museum of caricature in the Arab world opened in March 2009 in Fayoum, Egypt.