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 in which biblical villains were dressed as monks. His reformist painting "The Old and the New Law" identified the Old Testament with the "Old Religion". Scholars have detected subtler religious references in his portraits. In "The Ambassadors", for example, details such as the Lutheran hymn book and the crucifix behind the curtain allude to the context of the French mission. Holbein painted few religious images in the later part of his career. He focused on secular designs for decorative objects, and on portraits stripped of inessentials. For Holbein, "everything began with a drawing". A gifted draughtsman, he was heir to