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Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (aka The Ambassadors): Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533 (National Gallery, London)
Two poised and confident Renaissance courtiers, a French diplomat and his aristocratic companion, wonderfully captured by the master painter of the English court amid the symbols and trappings of all the intellectual and material accomplishments of an expanding world.
But when one looks for a while, in amidst this splendid celebration of the life of the age, this triumphant embodiment of the gloria mundi. one senses perhaps also a dissonant note, something eerie, something slightly "off', an unsettling element of the vertiginous and the spooky.
It's that odd flattened diagonal shape in the foreground of the picture.
What is it?
The mysterious foreground object is impossible to "read" from a frontal viewing angle. But when one resorts to a sidelong view, stationing oneself at an oblique angle in relation to the right side of the picture plane and looking at the painting "out of the corner of one's eye" as the saying goes, or "sneaking up on it" (cats sometimes look at each other in thus wise, at times when proper cat etiquette seems to forbid gazing straight-on), a recognizable image begins to emerge.
Holbein's painted skull is an anamorphic image.
Anamorphic drawing techniques were well known to Holbein and other artists of the age. Those practised in such techniques were able to produce a kind of drawing presenting a distorted image which appeared in "natural" form under certain conditions, as when viewed from a raking angle or reflected in a convex mirror.
When the anamorphosis in The Ambassadors is "corrected", the undistorted image of a skull appears. What could be the meaning of this?
Undistorted image of the anamorphic skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors (with anamorphosis "corrected"): image by Nataraja, 2005
The painting was made to be hung on a staircase in the chateau of the man seen on the left, Jean de Dinteville, ambassador of the French king Francis I to the court of Henry VIII. From below left, upon the stairs, or from the base of the staircase, in de Dinteville's chateau, the "corrected" skull image could probably have been made out easily enough.
Was this built-in reminder of the transitoriness of all worldly things a symbolic message woven by the artist into the work with the knowledge and consent of the man who intended to own and display it?
"The shadow of the shadow of death," as Mary F.S. Hervey so memorably compressed the content of this "hidden" message in her 1900 study of The Ambassadors: not exactly the sort of penumbra of association a courtly young Renaissance prince might have wished to have cast over, for example, a fashionable dinner party, or fancy-dress ball.
Seen as thus ominously enshadowed, must not this apparent paean to the glories of the world and the divinity in man be reinterpreted as a symbolic narrative of a very different sort? One, that is, in which the death's head, a figure of the concealed presence within this scene of Time as the Exterminating Angel, not unlike the presence of the mysterious dark shape that haunts the disturbing 1946 Robert Siodmak cinematic psychological thriller The Spiral Staircase, or, for that matter, the constant not-quite-visible presence of death within life, is always going to be lying in wait there, lurking at the bottom of the stairs?
Or could the anamorphic skull merely have been Holbein's "little surprise"?
The painter's name means "hollow bone" (hohle Bein) in German.
Was the painter simply creating a private ironic play, embedded within his work's complex internal play of signals, upon his own name?
But when one looks for a while, in amidst this splendid celebration of the life of the age, this triumphant embodiment of the gloria mundi. one senses perhaps also a dissonant note, something eerie, something slightly "off', an unsettling element of the vertiginous and the spooky.
It's that odd flattened diagonal shape in the foreground of the picture.
What is it?
The mysterious foreground object is impossible to "read" from a frontal viewing angle. But when one resorts to a sidelong view, stationing oneself at an oblique angle in relation to the right side of the picture plane and looking at the painting "out of the corner of one's eye" as the saying goes, or "sneaking up on it" (cats sometimes look at each other in thus wise, at times when proper cat etiquette seems to forbid gazing straight-on), a recognizable image begins to emerge.
Holbein's painted skull is an anamorphic image.
Anamorphic drawing techniques were well known to Holbein and other artists of the age. Those practised in such techniques were able to produce a kind of drawing presenting a distorted image which appeared in "natural" form under certain conditions, as when viewed from a raking angle or reflected in a convex mirror.
When the anamorphosis in The Ambassadors is "corrected", the undistorted image of a skull appears. What could be the meaning of this?
Undistorted image of the anamorphic skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors (with anamorphosis "corrected"): image by Nataraja, 2005
The painting was made to be hung on a staircase in the chateau of the man seen on the left, Jean de Dinteville, ambassador of the French king Francis I to the court of Henry VIII. From below left, upon the stairs, or from the base of the staircase, in de Dinteville's chateau, the "corrected" skull image could probably have been made out easily enough.
Was this built-in reminder of the transitoriness of all worldly things a symbolic message woven by the artist into the work with the knowledge and consent of the man who intended to own and display it?
"The shadow of the shadow of death," as Mary F.S. Hervey so memorably compressed the content of this "hidden" message in her 1900 study of The Ambassadors: not exactly the sort of penumbra of association a courtly young Renaissance prince might have wished to have cast over, for example, a fashionable dinner party, or fancy-dress ball.
Seen as thus ominously enshadowed, must not this apparent paean to the glories of the world and the divinity in man be reinterpreted as a symbolic narrative of a very different sort? One, that is, in which the death's head, a figure of the concealed presence within this scene of Time as the Exterminating Angel, not unlike the presence of the mysterious dark shape that haunts the disturbing 1946 Robert Siodmak cinematic psychological thriller The Spiral Staircase, or, for that matter, the constant not-quite-visible presence of death within life, is always going to be lying in wait there, lurking at the bottom of the stairs?
Or could the anamorphic skull merely have been Holbein's "little surprise"?
The painter's name means "hollow bone" (hohle Bein) in German.
Was the painter simply creating a private ironic play, embedded within his work's complex internal play of signals, upon his own name?
Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (aka The Ambassadors), detail: Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533 (National Gallery, London)
