The Ambassadors

Two French diplomats in London, surrounded by instruments for measuring the heavens and the earth. Across the floor lies a strange, stretched shape that can only be read from the side.

Stand to one side of the picture and look along its surface: the stretched shape on the floor becomes a skull.

Hans Holbein the Younger painted The Ambassadors in London in 1533. The man on the left is Jean de Dinteville, the French envoy at the court of Henry VIII. On the right stands his friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, who visited him that spring. Their ages appear in the picture: 29 on Dinteville’s dagger sheath and 25 on the book beneath de Selve’s elbow. The painting is just over two metres high and almost square.

Between the men stands a shelf full of objects. On top, an oriental carpet carries a celestial globe, several sundials and other instruments for measuring time and the heavens. Below are a terrestrial globe, a merchant’s arithmetic book, a lute with a broken string and a Lutheran hymn book. Together they show the learning a Renaissance man was expected to master.

Across the floor lies a stretched grey shape. It is an anamorphosis, an image distorted so that it only looks right from one particular angle. Seen obliquely from the side, it becomes a skull, a memento mori. In the top left corner a crucifix can just be seen behind the green curtain. Death and the hope of resurrection thus frame all the worldly learning.

The year 1533 was turbulent. Henry VIII broke with the Pope in order to marry Anne Boleyn, and the Lutheran Reformation was dividing the Church. The broken string and the hymn book have been read as signs of that division. The painting long remained at the Dinteville family’s château of Polisy, which is marked on the terrestrial globe. The National Gallery in London bought it in 1890.

• Hans Holbein d.y.
• The Renaissance