The Ambassadors

Two worldly young men - a French ambassador and a bishop - stand on either side of a shelf crowded with the instruments of learning: globes, sundials, a quadrant, a lute, books of music and arithmetic. It is a display of mastery over the measurable world, and yet the lute's string is broken and a small crucifix half-hides behind the curtain. Stretched across the floor floats a strange smear that resolves, seen from the side, into a human skull - a memento mori sliding death into the picture at an angle the sitters cannot see. It is Holbein's supreme feat of illusion and meaning.