Hans Holbein the Younger's 'The Ambassadors': Eight Facts About the 1533 Double Portrait at the National Gallery

Key facts

• The Ambassadors was painted on oak panel between mid-April and June 4, 1533, measuring 81 inches wide and 82 inches tall, making it Holbein's largest work.
• The sitters are Jean de Dinteville, Francis I's ambassador to England, and Georges de Selve, French ambassador to the Venetian Republic; in 1533 they were 29 and 25 years old.
• Holbein used heat-bodied linseed oil mixed with pine resin to accelerate drying, allowing rapid execution despite the painting's complexity.
• The painting includes a cabinet of curiosities: astronomical instruments, a celestial globe, a lute with a broken string, flutes, an arithmetic book, a Lutheran hymn book, and a Large-Pattern Holbein carpet from Ottoman Anatolia.
• The objects are interpreted as commentary on the 1533 political and religious rupture caused by Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn and break with the Catholic Church.
• The anamorphic skull in the foreground only resolves into a proportional skull when viewed from a specific angle, possibly from a staircase, serving as a memento mori.
• In the 1960s, Edgar Samuel, with the Warburg Institute and the British Optical Association, demonstrated that a hollow glass tube could correct the skull's proportions and align it with Dinteville.
• The National Gallery's 1997 restoration of the skull area was criticized as over-restoration that altered color balance and the optical illusion, fueling debates on conservation ethics.