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 Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the tent of Achilles is an 1801 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, produced for the Prix de Rome competition. It is now in the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. It shows an episode from Homer's "Iliad", in which Achilles refuses to listen to the envoys sent by Agamemnon to convince him back into the Trojan War. The topic assigned for the artists competing for the Prix de Rome in 1801 was the warriors' procession toward battle; Ingres' interpretation of the subject characteristically emphasized a moment