The Ambassadors
by Hans Holbein the Younger
- 2 -
Jan Luyken, Anne Boleyn’s Execution, between 1664 and 1712, British Museum
Content of the inscription in the lower margin: "I.L."
and
"ANNA BULLEYN, Gemalinne van HENDRIK DE VIII
Koning van Engeland, binnen London onthalst."
ANNA BULLEYN, wife of HENRY VIII
King of England, beheaded in London.
Hypothesis
Is the following hypothesis plausible given the preceding facts ?
Did the execution of Anne on May 19, 1536, "oblige" Holbein (in agreement with Dinteville?) to "display" her severed head at the feet of the ambassadors in an aesthetically pleasing representation—the only acceptable one here — an anamorphosis, in the colors of ghostly evanescence in death ? Positioned precisely on the midline, the anamorphic image now appears to be the most important "person" in the painting.
Reading Eric Ives's biography led me to this hypothesis; Ives speaks at length about The Ambassadors, describes the painting well; all the elements are there, yet Ives never once considers that Anne Boleyn could be the anamorphic image. He didn't mention Holbein's transformation of the skull from a universal symbol into a coded political message, nor the symbolic reversal: the same ground, from glory to death.
The painting doesn't begin with two ambassadors. It begins with Anne Boleyn and ends with her.
Could this anamorphic image of a skull have been added to the foreground after Anne Boleyn's decapitation, as a painful reminder from those who had sided with her ? Overjoyed after her coronation, Anne Boleyn commissioned the painting from Holbein to present to Dinteville as a thank you for his assistance. Did Hans Holbein truly paint this imposing work, measuring 2.07 m by 2.09 m, in just seven months, from April to November 1533 ? And if so, how can we explain the partial concealment of the Westminster Abbey marble marquetry, the most decorative part of the painting, through anamorphosis ?
The seven-month timeframe is remarkably short for a work of this complexity and size. This could suggest either a multi-stage execution or that certain elements —including the anamorphosis — were added later.
The concealment of the marquetry seems crucial to me. Why partially cover the most decorative and symbolically charged element of the painting — the Westminster Abbey floor — if not to inscribe something urgent and subsequent ? Holbein would not have made this choice from the outset.
The skull's central position, its perfectly centered placement, reflects a deliberate intention, not an improvised addition.
The ghostly color: These whitish, evanescent hues contrast sharply with the rich colors of the rest of the painting, as if the skull belonged to a different pictorial moment.
What does the chronology tell us ?
Dinteville was ambassador to London three times, in 1533, 1536, and 1537 :
For 1536 : L&P, X, 908, 1069, 1084, 1085, 1118, 1123 ; L&P, XI, 7, 28, 36, 52.
On May 19, Eustace Chapuys wrote to Charles V: “The bailiff of Troyes, upon learning of the concubine’s imprisonment, lingered for a few days in Boulogne, feigning illness, awaiting news from his master in case there were any changes to be made to his mission.” (L&P, X, 908)
For 1537 : L&P, XII 1, 625, 647, 817, 832, 869, 884, 939 ; L&P, XII 2, 832.
On March 10: Instructions from Francis I to Jean de Dinteville, bailiff of Troyes, regarding what he must declare to the King of England. (Ms. Bibl. Nat. Paris. Camusat, 13)
If Holbein did indeed add the anamorphic image in memory of Anne Boleyn in 1536, he was taking a considerable risk, but he concealed the tribute behind :
The message was coded, beyond the reach of Henry VIII, and technically defensible as a simple memento mori.
Although the painting is signed and dated in the lower left corner, in a shaded area : IOANNES HOLBEIN PINGEBAT 1533, it may have been completed years later. Indeed, Holbein used the imperfect tense, which describes a past action that is not yet finished, or that is repeated in the past. He could have written : PINGEBIT or FECIT. The perfect tense would then have indicated a past action completed at the time of writing, or the present result of a past action.
Is it certain that the painting left England in Jean de Dinteville's luggage in November 1533 to reach the Château de Polisy, the Dinteville family home, near Troyes ?
(The Polisy estate had belonged to the Dinteville family since the 11th century, but it is unknown when the oldest castle on this site was built. In 1537, Jean de Dinteville, having become paralyzed, retired to Poligny and had the castle remodeled starting in 1544.)
Holbein, in consultation with Dinteville during his second stay at the London court in 1533, may have conceived the overall architecture and meaning of the painting using sketches. And could Dinteville not have received the completed work during one of his last two embassies to England, from May to July in 1536 or in March-April 1537, given that Anne Boleyn was beheaded on May 19, 1536 ? These later travels may explain the attribution and dating of other portraits of Dinteville attributed to Holbein, including a painting on wood, Portrait of a Man Holding a Lute, from 1534 or 1535, now in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, and a charcoal drawing heightened with color, which appears to be a study for it, now in Windsor Castle.
It is written that Dinteville commissioned this painting from Holbein to commemorate the visit to London of his friend, the Bishop of Lavaur, for Easter in 1533, but could Holbein not have transformed the initial project into a poignant depiction of the execution of Anne Boleyn, which would have been more to his patron's liking ? If this painting is presented today as a representation, in the first third of the 16th century, of the turning point in the history of Christianity in Europe and the birth of the Anglican Church, the indirect presence of Anne Boleyn seems highly probable, even implied.
The anamorphosis then becomes not a sophisticated play on perspective but a device of political concealment. To truly see the skull, one must move, stand to the side, at an angle. This is precisely the position of the evangelicals in 1536, neither inside nor outside, forced to circumvent, to hide, to encrypt their convictions.
In her first work, during Anne's lifetime, the painting, without anamorphosis, is balanced around a central axis, where, for the time being, no figure of the highest status in a 16th-century painting is depicted. The two French ambassadors stand on either side of this axis, in the same inverted pose, at an almost identical distance if we disregard the fullness of Dinteville's garment.
Before the addition of the anamorphic skull in 1536, according to my hypothesis, the painting presents two "empty" areas : a plain green curtain at the top and the Cosmatesque marquetry at the bottom.
These two "empty" areas (outlined in red) have a profound pictorial and symbolic logic.
At the top : the plain green damask curtain serves as a neutral and prestigious background for the two figures. This is a classic pictorial convention of representational portraiture during the Renaissance : the curtain (often green or red) isolates the subjects from the surrounding context, focuses the viewer's gaze on them, and signals their high status. It also creates a sense of depth, like a theatrical set. Its green color also evokes stability and virtue.
Below : the Cosmatesque marquetry floor anchors the scene in a sacred and royal space. But pictorially, this lower area is also an "available" surface—flat, geometric, and neutral in terms of narrative. Once the painting was finished, after Anne's execution, Holbein would have exploited this ideal location for anamorphosis, precisely because the floor offers the necessary grazing angle of vision for its rendering.
I believe the anamorphic skull was not part of the original 1533 composition. It was painted later. It falls upon a lower space that, before its arrival, formed the exact symmetrical counterpart to the upper celestial space — the cosmological pavement of Westminster mirroring the astronomical instruments, men suspended between earth and sky. The skull destroys this symmetry. Formally, violently.
For Eric Ives, the painting contains clear references to Anne's coronation. All the celestial instruments arranged on the two shelves in the background, whether directly, like the cylindrical and polyhedral dials, or indirectly through astronomical movements, indicate with clockwork precision the date of April 11, 1533, Good Friday, at 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. That is to say, the exact day on which the royal court, and undoubtedly Dinteville, was informed that Anne would be the next Queen of England. This date is there, at the center of the painting, invisible yet omnipresent, even before Holbein places the skull.
The painting covers exactly three years :
Between these two dates — the announcement and the death — lies precisely the length of a brief reign, of hope and its destruction. Holbein painted the two extremes of the same tragedy.
The two ambassadors now stand upright between these two dates, April 11, 1533, and May 19, 1536, in what Julia Kristeva calls "the void," but which, it seems to me, is no longer metaphorical.
More than a Vanitas in the tradition of scientific still lifes, more than a Memento morri ("remember that you will die"), the motto of the Dinteville family, which the brooch pinned to Jean de Dinteville's cap depicts with a tiny skull and which might have sufficed to explain the theme, more than an Ars moriendi (art of dying), which Erasmus discussed with the Boleyn family in December 1533, this skull is a cry of pain and anger.
(“Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas – Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:10.)
For why add this skull at the feet of the two figures, why destroy the mosaic in a way and disfigure, massacre the entire picture so delicately and painstakingly painted by this ghost that will haunt so many memories, if not to inscribe there the brutal end of a life cut short by the sword of an executioner from Calais ? One of the guides at the National Gallery may be right to raise the hypothesis of the representation of a murder, with this body in its ascension. Painting the anamorphic portrait of Anne Boleyn superimposed on it would have been a reckless challenge, one that would have come at a very high price, issued to Henry VIII. The anamorphosis of a skull could be explained (falsely) during questioning by the Dinteville family motto.
Hans Holbein the Younger
Portrait of Henry VIII of England, 1540
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
This deformed skull seems to express Anne's pain and incomprehension at the time and place of her death. "Father, why have you forsaken me ?" What if the eyes of the skull (Anne's ?) in its anamorphic state were looking at the hidden Christ ? This is no longer the case when the anamorphosis disappears, since the skull looks at us, obliquely. In turn, does Christ look at the anamorphosis ?
For Sigmund Freud, death is unrepresentable in the unconscious, yet it can be marked there by the destruction of representation. This is fully achieved through anamorphosis, which constitutes, in Julia Kristeva's words, "the unimaginable and invisible horizon of death." The distortion of the skull (of Anne's death) somehow eliminates this death, unbearable to both sight and mind.
Holbein did exactly what Freud described, perhaps because it was the only solution that was psychologically and formally possible.
The death of Anne Boleyn (or anyone deeply close to her) cannot be represented. Not only for political reasons, but because it is inherently unrepresentable. Holbein does not paint death. He paints the destruction of representation itself. The anamorphic skull is not an image of death ; it is a damaged, illegible image that distorts and pierces the pictorial surface just as the repressed pierces discourse. The skull alone does not represent anything. It is the distortion of representation. The irruption of something that can only take form by undoing form. Its shadow, cast in the opposite direction to that of the other elements in the painting, indicates an arrival from a dimension beyond time.
The absence has a name. The painted ghost is someone. Anamorphosis does not produce the effect of absence abstractly ; it produces it because it commemorates a real, unspeakable, politically deadly loss.
The painting is no longer merely a diplomatic portrait with a vanitas theme. It becomes a painting of impossible mourning.
Anamorphosis allows, depending on the viewer's position, for Anne to disappear and then be reborn, in a way. But it will always be only a skull, anonymous, as if to abolish the pain that a real face would evoke.
There are correspondences between names : "Boleyn" is a near anagram of "Holbein." The skull at the feet of the two ambassadors is intrinsically linked to Holbein's name, since, cut in two, *höhle Bein* means "hollow bone" in German ("hollow leg" in the sense of "hollow bone"). His secret signature, then. *Höhle* also means "cave" or "grotto". Here lies Hans Holbein. In the same hollow, the same cavern, the same sepulcher as Anne Boleyn. Beneath the marble. Within the painting itself, intended for private contemplation. Now, for the eyes of the entire world to see.
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of Christ Dead in the Tomb
between 1520 and 1522, Basel, Kunstmuseum
The Crucified One, from his elevated position (to the right of the scene relative to the two men, to the left for us), would thus gaze upon the skull as he gazes upon Adam's in so many paintings, and as he will gaze upon Hans Holbein's long after death has claimed him in 1543. Thus, through this gaze, the sins of the two ambassadors will be redeemed, but also those of the painter Holbein, and possibly the sins of the woman who stood upon the marble marquetry of Westminster Abbey. Through this Adamic skull (born of clay) redeemed by the Crucified One (born of flesh), each and every one finds their place in the long lineage of humankind, beginning with the original couple in Eden, according to Christian tradition. Another note of hope for every Christian : after death (of the Savior on the cross or for anyone else in any other place), there will come the resurrection (on the third day for the Risen Christ emerging from the tomb, or at the end of time for Christian eschatology) that this anamorphosis foreshadows. Is it this weaving, this intertwining of ultimate, entirely Christian meanings, that Holbein has woven into the hollows of this skull ?
This skull is the third anamorphosis in the history of art, after those of Leonardo da Vinci in the Codex Atlanticus of 1485, the first known anamorphoses, of a face and an eye, and that of Jean Perréal, after 1515, of the simultaneously royal and divine eye of Louis XII at the top of the tent under which Mary Tudor Brandon presents the royal jewels to Claude of France, the new French queen, in one of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in the Cluny Museum in Paris.
Anamorphoses by Leonardo da Vinci
1485 - Codex Atlanticus, fol. 35v
The Lady and the Unicorn
detail from the tapestry The Touch/The Tent
The Ambassadors through the lens of psychoanalysis
The remarks of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan may help us understand why the anamorphosis of a skull imposed itself on Hans Holbein, like a figure emerging from a dream or waking vision, from his unconscious. He writes about this “floating object” :
… this painting, whose resonances and connections to vanitas paintings I have already mentioned […] reflects our own nothingness in the figure of the skull. Thus, the geometric dimension of vision is used to captivate the subject, an evident connection to desire which, nevertheless, remains enigmatic.
[…] How can we fail to see here, immanent to the geometric dimension, […] something symbolic of the function of lack—of the appearance of the phallic phantom ?
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, 1973, p. 101 et 102.
Such is indeed the anamorphosis that a rigid cylinder is required to read it. And further on, Lacan adds :
Holbein makes visible to us here something that is nothing other than the subject as annihilated—annihilated in a form that is, properly speaking, the pictorial incarnation of the at least phi of castration, which centers for us the entire organization of desires through the framework of the fundamental drives.
But it is even further on that we must look for the function of vision. We will then see emerging from it, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic phantom, but the gaze as such, in its pulsating, dazzling, and expansive function, as it is in this painting.
This painting is nothing other than what every painting is, a trap for the gaze. In any painting whatsoever, it is precisely by seeking the gaze at each of its points that you will see it disappear.
Lacan touches on something crucial here : "a trap for the gaze."
The painting captures the viewer's gaze, but whose gaze exactly ? In The Ambassadors, the trap is set twice over.
There is our direct gaze, the one that sees the two men, the globe, the instruments, even the crucifix. The real but unstable world.
And there is the oblique gaze, the one that sees the skull. The gaze of mourning.
These two gazes are not equivalent. They cannot be held simultaneously. To see the skull, one must lose everything else ; the ambassadors are distorted, the world fades away.
This is precisely the structure of impossible mourning. One cannot see loss and the world at the same time. One cannot hold together the dead Anne Boleyn and the diplomacy that continues.
"The gaze as such, in its pulsating function." Pulsating, beating, returning, insisting. Like the repressed. Like unresolved grief.
The gaze does not disappear in this painting ; it alternates. It is condemned to choose, to lose, to return.
The trap of the gaze has a designated victim. Dinteville himself I, condemned to see sometimes the world it represents, sometimes the death it cannot name. The first viewer of the painting is perhaps still its only true viewer.
* * * *
The last paragraph that Julia Kristeva devotes to Holbein's art can be applied in its entirety to The Ambassadors :
With eyes filled with this vision of the invisible, let us look once more at the humanity that Holbein has created : heroes of modern times, they stand strict, sober, and upright. Secretive, too : as true as can be and yet indecipherable. No movement betraying pleasure. No exalted ascent toward the beyond. Nothing but the sober difficulty of standing here below. They simply remain upright around a void that makes them strangely alone. Sure. And close.
J. Kristeva, Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie, Gallimard, 1987, p. 149-150.
This paragraph by Julia Kristeva is absolutely spot-on, and when applied to The Ambassadors, it takes on its full, stark intensity.
"Secrets too : as true as can be, and yet undecipherable." Dinteville and de Selve look at us with this total candor, this overwhelming physical presence, and carry a secret that four centuries have yet to unravel.
"No movement betraying pleasure. No exalted ascent toward the beyond." No tears. No pious gesture. No glance toward the heavens. They remain in the world, diplomats, humanists, men of duty, while something within them died with Anne Boleyn.
This is the very definition of impossible mourning. Life continuing on its smooth surface.
"They simply stand upright around a void that makes them strangely alone." This void, which Julia Kristeva names without seeing it, is beneath their feet. It is the skull. Höhle Bein. The two Renaissance men knew this, and we didn't. Until now.
Bibliography
Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p. 234-235 ; et « The Queen and the Painters : Anne Boleyn, Holbein and Tudor royal portraits », Apollo, CXL, 1994, p. 36-45.
John North, The Ambassadors' Secret : Holbein and the World of the Renaissance, Hambledon Continuum, 2001, argues that the composition of *The Ambassadors* is saturated with Christian geometry, numerology, and cosmography.
Jack Leslau
http://www.holbeinartworks.org/dsixartists.htm
Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, Martin Wyld, "Holbein's: Making and Meaning", National Gallery Publications, 1997.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/catalogues/foister-2024/the-ambassadors
Martin Wyld, « The restoration History of Holbein’s Ambassadors », National Gallery Technical Bulletin, vol. 19, 1998, p. 4-25
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/media/15654/wyld1998.pdf
Susan Foister, Rachel Billinge, Marika Spring and Lea Viehweger, with contributions by Lorne Campbell and Allison Goudie, The German Paintings before 1800 (London: National Gallery Global and Yale University Press, 2024).
Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein's "Ambassadors", the picture and the men, George Bell and sons, Londres, 1900.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77401/pg77401-images.html
https://ia800306.us.archive.org/15/items/gri_33125001712401/gri_33125001712401.pdf
John Sharp, « Problems with Holbein's Ambassadors and the Anamorphosis of the Skull », Bridges: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science, 1998, p. 157–166.
https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/1998/bridges1998-157.pdf
Denis Favennec, La peinture et son double. Observations sur les « Ambassadeurs » de Hans Holbein le Jeune.
https://www.academie-sciences-lettres-toulouse.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2013-20-Favennec.pdf
Allain Glykos, Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM33JEoOUIM
Glenn Richardson, « The French connection: Francis I and England’s break with Rome », The Contending Kingdoms’: France and England 1420–1700, éd. G. Richardson, Aldershot, 2008, p. 95–116.
https://www.academia.edu/7192287/England_and_France_in_the_Sixteenth_Century
Jurgus Baltrušaitis, Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses, Paris, Perrin, 1955.
Margaret Bolton, ed., De Carles’ Trial and Death of Queen Anne Boleyn: Translated into Modern English, Create Space Independent Publishing Platform (2015).
Maria Dowling, “Anne Boleyn and Reform,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984) : 30-46.
Elizabeth Norton, The Anne Boleyn Papers, Amberley Publishing (2013).
Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, Cambridge University Press (1989, 1991).
Alison Weir, The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, Ballantine Books (2010).
♦
Questions to evaluate my hypothesis :
Is there any technical evidence — derived from infrared reflectography, stratigraphic analysis, or paint sampling — that might indicate whether the anamorphic skull was incorporated into the composition from the outset, or whether it may have been added at a later stage, once the cosmatesque pavement had already been laid in ?
More specifically, is the underdrawing or paint layer sequence provides any indication as to whether the anamorphosis was planned as an integral part of the original design, or whether it overlies a pre-existing, fully rendered floor. Was the cosmatesque pavement painted in its entirety before the skull was introduced ?
To let me know your opinion on this hypothesis and possibly correspond with me, please use the following link. Thank you very much.
jacky.lorette@laposte.net