The Ambassadors
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 or 1498 to 1543) · 1533
Two young Frenchmen stand life size on either side of a table crowded with objects. On the left, in fur and pink satin, is Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador to the court of Henry the Eighth, aged twenty nine. On the right, in sober clerical dress, is his friend Georges de Selve, a bishop, aged twenty five. They were in London in 1533, a tense year in which Henry broke with Rome and married Anne Boleyn, and the painting quietly records that moment.
The table is a puzzle to be read. On the upper shelf are instruments for measuring the heavens: a celestial globe, sundials, a quadrant and a torquetum. On the lower shelf are earthly things: a terrestrial globe, a lute with a broken string, a case of flutes, a book of arithmetic and a Lutheran hymn book lying open. The broken string is usually read as a sign of discord in Christendom. Holbein painted every surface, the Turkish carpet, the mosaic floor copied from Westminster Abbey, the green damask curtain, with astonishing precision.
Then there is the strange grey smear across the bottom of the picture. Walk to the right hand side and look along the surface, and it resolves into a human skull, a reminder of death painted in extreme perspective. Half hidden in the top left corner, a small silver crucifix offers the answer to it. The painting hung at Dinteville's chateau at Polisy for two centuries and came to the National Gallery in 1890.
Did You Know? The sundials on the table have been used to date the painting to a specific day, 11 April 1533, at about ten thirty in the morning.
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