The Ambassadors (Holbein) the lower shelf repeats a portion of a cartographically imaginative map created in possibly 1530 and of unknown origin. The map is referred to as the Ambassadors' Globe due to its popularly known appearance in the painting. The work has been described as "one of the most staggeringly impressive portraits in Renaissance art." The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work, however, is the distorted skull which is placed in the bottom center of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the
Hans Holbein the Younger ideas of the Italian Renaissance. By the time Holbein began his apprenticeship under Hans Herbster in Basel, he was already steeped in the late Gothic style, with its unsparing realism and emphasis on line, which influenced him throughout his life. In Basel, he was favoured by humanist patrons, whose ideas helped form his vision as a mature artist. During his Swiss years, when he may have visited Italy, Holbein added an Italian element to his stylistic vocabulary. Scholars note the influence of Leonardo da Vinci's "sfumato" (smoky) technique on his work, for example in his "Venus and Amor" and "Lais