ahhhhh itās my favourite painting on my dash!! strap in folks itās nerd commentary time!!
so thereās like a billion and one things going on in this painting (because itās the middle of the renaissance and they got a liāl excited) so letās 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 itās called ambassadorsĀ 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 isnāt really the point. what isĀ 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 weāve 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, weāve 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 artistās ability to paint details. youāve 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 heās 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 š the šĀ rage šĀ 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 donāt think itās impressive that he could paint this by hand, youĀ try it because dear lord itās not fun pls pls professor let us go back to normal still lifes weāll never complain about onion skins and tomatoes ever again aaaaaughā
um soĀ second, this is a form of memento mori,Ā or vanitas, meaningĀ āremember you must dieā andĀ āvanityā (a reference to ecclesiastes), respectively. the point of painting these was to remind the owner that they are mortal, and that time is short ā 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 itās placed on the floor. compare this to michelangeloāsĀ creation of adam, which is a reference to the beginning of life,Ā and is placed on the sistine chapelāsĀ ceiling.Ā
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 canāt unsee it. because, once again, this is the middle of the renaissance: holbein wants to stress both the importance of human knowledge (platoās know thyself), and its limits (calvināsĀ āman never has clear knowledge of self until he has seen Godās faceā). 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 canāt help myself and yāknow they were receptive), so yeah. thereās the cliff notes version.
yousharknotpass
2087
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
titsay
amandla
kianamaiart
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