ahhhhh it’s my favourite painting on my dash!! strap in folks it’s nerd commentary time!!
so there’s like a billion and one things going on in this painting (because it’s the middle of the renaissance and they got a li’l excited) so let’s break this down.
first off, it was painted smack dab in the middle of the renaissance (1533) which means people-with-money are interested in two primary things:
this is important and will explain 90% of everything going on (the remaining 10% is just the painter showing off).
okay, so first off it’s called ambassadors because on either side we have a)a stately, educated man of the world, and b)a religious figure head. who precisely they were was up for debate for like 300 hundred years and isn’t really the point. what is the point is that one of them represents the best of man, and the other the best from God; they therefore are ambassadors of these two facets, and to prove their excellence, we have all the items on the shelves.
on the top shelf we’ve got a celestial globe, a sundial, a quadrant, a torquetum, etc. these are all things focused on learning the up there, the things beyond this world but yet are still scientific that humans are categorizing.
meanwhile on the bottom shelf, we’ve got the awesome things of human learning on earth: a terrestrial globe, a book of mathematics for merchants, a lute, hymnal, etc.
the point of having all these things is to show off the glory of human excellence when it comes to learning and also the artist’s ability to paint details. you’ve got the full trivium of learning going on: grammar, logic, rhetoric; and then also the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. everything is balanced.
holbein is also problematizing human learning even as he’s extolling its virtues. for example, we have a broken string on the lute:
the instrument settings on the polyhedral sundial are actually wrong:
and, most importantly, that mother effing skull.
so the skull represents a couple things.
first, perspective was all 👏 the 👏 rage 👏 during the renaissance, and the better you were at it, the higher respect you got. so if you could draw something like this (which a previous commenter is correct, it was hung by a staircase so you would see it as you passed by), you automatically got that sweet sweet street cred. also if you don’t think it’s impressive that he could paint this by hand, you try it because dear lord it’s not fun pls pls professor let us go back to normal still lifes we’ll never complain about onion skins and tomatoes ever again aaaaaugh—
um so second, this is a form of memento mori, or vanitas, meaning “remember you must die” and “vanity” (a reference to ecclesiastes), respectively. the point of painting these was to remind the owner that they are mortal, and that time is short — and that no matter how much human knowledge they accumulated (the shelves), nothing could stop death.
side note: the placement of the skull is also important. the skull is a reference to death, the end of life, so it’s placed on the floor. compare this to michelangelo’s creation of adam, which is a reference to the beginning of life, and is placed on the sistine chapel’s ceiling.
for life you look up, for death you look down.
AND BECAUSE OF THAT, we get to the last thing this painting is hiding:
a crucifix, tucked away in the top left corner so that you can barely see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. because, once again, this is the middle of the renaissance: holbein wants to stress both the importance of human knowledge (plato’s know thyself), and its limits (calvin’s ‘man never has clear knowledge of self until he has seen God’s face’). remember knowledge, remember death, remember christ.
and remember how good of a painter he is he needs more patrons.
anyway i could wax poetic about this painting for literal hours (the one and only time i saw it in person i wound up explicating to random viewers bc i can’t help myself and y’know they were receptive), so yeah. there’s the cliff notes version.
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