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 from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. In his studio both his sons, Ambrosius and Hans, received their first painting lessons as well as an introduction to the crafts of the goldsmith, jeweller and printmaker. The young Holbein, alongside his brother and his father, is pictured in the left-hand panel of Holbein the Elder's 1504 altar-piece triptych the "Basilica of St. Paul", which is displayed at the Staatsgalerie in Augsberg. In 1515 Ambrosius lived in the Swiss town of Stein am Rhein, where he helped a Schaffhausen painter named Thomas Schmid with the murals in the main hall of the