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
The Gilded Cage (Evelyn De Morgan painting) The Gilded Cage (Evelyn De Morgan painting) The Gilded Cage is an oil painting by Evelyn De Morgan, with apparent stylistic influences of spatial representation from Surrealist modes of thought. It was her final work before her death in 1919. It is essentially an allegory for female hypnotic delirium. In this painting, a woman "looks out" from what seems to be a window that may, in fact, be a scene from a mural painting within the greater composition with her hand stretched out and up in a gesture of yearning. She is looking at what may be compared to a