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 the Old Gospel"). These works were arranged by Holbein with Melchior & Gaspar Trechsel near 1526, later printed and edited in Latin by Jean & Francois Frellon with 92 woodcuts. These two works also share the first four figures with the "Dance of Death". It appears that the Trechsel brothers initially intended to hire Holbein for illustrating Bibles. In fact, some of Holbein's "Icones" woodcuts appear in the recently discovered "Biblia cum Glossis" by Michel De Villeneuve (Michael Servetus). Holbein woodcuts appear in several other works by Servetus: his Spanish translation of "The images of the stories of the Old