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
Ambrosius Holbein Holbein ranks among the most important of Basel's illustrators and prominent "small format" artists. Ambrosius Holbein Ambrosius Holbein (c. 1494 – c. 1519) was a German and Swiss artist in painting, drawing and printmaking. He was the elder brother, by about three years, of Hans Holbein the Younger, but he appears to have died in his mid twenties leaving behind only a small body of work. Like his younger brother, he was born in Augsburg (which today is in Bavaria, but then was a free imperial city), a center of art, culture and trade at that time. His father Hans