Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors": Memento Mori

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Thanks for resurrecting this thread, Pinz; I'd completely forgotten about it.

Interesting to note from the initial post that in September 2009 I didn't know how to post pictures on the web. Thanks to Catherine for her patient tuition.

Renaissance art: a matter of perspective

Court painters of the 15th and 16th centuries often deployed visual tricks to demonstrate their mastery of the form

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian


Game of skull … The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533), complete with macabre hidden message. Click for the full image. Photo: National Gallery/Corbis

"And perspective it is best painter's art", wrote Shakespeare in his 24th sonnet (OUP text), "For through the painter must you see his skill / To find where your true image pictured lies ..."

The word "perspective" is being used here in an unfamiliar way. We associate perspective with logic and sense, as well as with the art of the Renaissance. To get things in perspective is to get a balanced and accurate view. But Shakespeare uses perspective to mean something more mysterious. The perspective painter, he suggests, uses skill to create a mystery picture that must be looked "through" to find your "true image".

This is a fascinating reference to art in Shakespeare. It is not hard to find Tudor paintings that match his image of "perspective" as optical trickery, the hiding of the truth in a difficult image. In the National Portrait Gallery you can see a painting of Edward VI that is deliberately distorted. In 1546 the artist William Scrots portrayed Edward as a stretched face suspended over a landscape: you have to stand to the side, close to the wall, to get a more realistic view of the young Tudor.

This is a "special effect" whose most famous example is next door, in the National Gallery, in Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Ambassadors. Holbein shows two gentlemen and their attributes of science and learning in mesmerising detail, but across the surface of the painting erupts a black and white smear or stain. Once again, only when you stand at the side will it resolve itself into the stark image of a skull.

Was it Holbein who brought this technique to Britain? This German painter who worked at the court of Henry VIII was far in advance of homegrown artists as a master of Renaissance techniques. Distorted perspective is a tricksy variation on the skills and science that evolved in 15th- and 16th-century Europe to depict the real world: it is therefore a show-off stunt by masters of technique. It's because Holbein can paint faces so realistically that he can also distort an object while including within that distortion the "true" appearance of the thing.

Renaissance courts loved trick art. In the gallery of Prague Castle hangs a portrait cut into strips, which shows you alternating faces of three Habsburgs according to where you stand. Another famous portrait of Rudolf II, the eccentric Prague dynast, by Arcimboldo shows him as a collection of fruit and vegetables. Were such tricks more popular the further you got from the centre of art and learning in Italy?

There's something raw and naive about the Tudor culture that was amazed by trick paintings. But out of this northern outpost of the Renaissance comes Shakespeare, effortlessly including an image of painterly curiosity in his intricate labyrinth of words.