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
Hans Holbein the Younger dispersed his effects, including many designs and preliminary drawings that have survived. The site of Holbein's grave is unknown and may never have been marked. The first influence on Holbein was his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished religious artist and portraitist who passed on his techniques as a religious artist and his gifts as a portraitist to his son. The young Holbein learned his craft in his father's workshop in Augsburg, a city with a thriving book trade, where woodcut and engraving flourished. Augsburg also acted as one of the chief "ports of entry" into Germany for the