The Ambassadors is a 1533 painting by German-born Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). To put things into context, 1533 was the year that Elizabeth I was born, and was slap bang at the dawning of what historians would come to call the Scientific Revolution (conventionally launched by the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543). Whilst at first sight, the painting is a double portrait (of French diplomat Jean de Dinteville and bishop Georges de Selve), closer inspection shows so much more. There is a meticulously rendered array of scientific devices, books and a lute, as well as one of the best-known examples of anamorphosis in art (a distorted projection of a skull that can only be properly viewed from a specific vantage point).
I’m not a fan of the anamorphic skull to be honest, it’s kind of jarring…but the rest is spectacular. I’ve seen this up close and personal at the National Gallery and it is remarkable in its detail. Let’s see some of those details. There are two globes (a terrestrial one and a celestial one), a shepherd’s dial, a quadrant, a torquetum, and a polyhedral sundial, each exquisitely painted.
The lute can be seen to have a broken string, interpreted as a symbol of discord, perhaps between science and religion. Near the lute is a Lutheran hymnal, in which the words and music can be read, and an arithmetic book with minute equations depicted.
Holbein was pretty good with fabric, too. The upper shelf is lined by an Anatolian carpet, a feature that pops up in many a Holbein. The chap on the left is in secular garb, the one on the right is in clerical clothing, both rendered finely, and perhaps, again, a symbol of religious strife. The backdrop, meanwhile, is a richly green, thickly folded curtain (to the top left of which a small crucifix is peeping out).
Holbein moved to England in 1526 and welcomed into the humanist circle of Sir Thomas More. He soon built a strong reputation which is why you can see scores of his painting in the National Portrait Gallery too.
