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
Love at the Bottom of the Sea first release with Merge since 1999's "69 Love Songs". After releasing three albums relatively free of synthesizers as part of a "no-synth trilogy" (2004's "i", 2008's "Distortion", and 2010's "Realism"), "Love at the Bottom of the Sea" features the blend of acoustic and synthesized instruments that the band was known for in the 1990s. Stephin Merritt claims he took a fresh approach with the instrumentation, stating "Most of the synthesizers on the record didn't exist when we were last using synthesizers." All of the tracks on the album are less than three minutes long. "Love at the Bottom of the