Les Ambassadeurs

Holbein painted these two Frenchmen in London in 1533, and 1533 is the key. That year Henry VIII broke with Rome to marry Anne Boleyn, and the man on the left, Jean de Dinteville, was France's ambassador watching it all unfold. His friend on the right, Georges de Selve, was a young bishop. Between them, on two shelves, sits a small museum of the age. Globes, sundials, and instruments for reading the heavens above, and below them a lute and hymn books. Look closely at the lute and you find a string deliberately broken, a quiet sign of the discord splitting Christendom just then. Then there is the strange grey smear stretched across the floor. Stand to the side and it snaps into a human skull, a reminder of death hidden in a picture full of worldly learning. It hangs in the National Gallery in London.